Social network analysis

Social network analysis is a research process that utilizes mathematical tools (especially from graph theory) to analyze social networks. This discipline characterizes network structures in terms of nodes representing the social network’s members and edges representing the data traffic paths and interactions among them.

This course will address the key issues of social network analysis, particularly social network analysis based on recursive algorithms and mathematical tools from graph theory and linear algebra.
The course will review a variety of scientific approaches for social network analysis that are also used to study structures of interactions among entities, where entities may include people, organizations, geographic regions, and countries.
These methods are broadly applied in research towards characterizing, analyzing, and understanding phenomena in many fields.

Despite the great difference among entities and fields, some aspects and phenomena are common to all networks. These .phenomena, which the course will discuss, are largely explainable by the network’s structure and centrality indices
The course will present the key principles of social network theory, and discuss studies and applications in this field.