Big Data Analysis and Data Mining

Social Network Analysis

Social network analysis is the process of investigating social structures through the use of networks and graph theory. This article introduces data scientists to the theory of social networks, with a short introduction to graph theory and information spread. It dives into Python code with NetworkX constructing and implying social networks from real datasets. Nodes (A, B,C,D,E in the example) are usually representing entities in the network, and can hold self-properties (such as weight, size, position and any other attribute) and network-based properties (such as Degree- number of neighbors or Cluster- a connected component the node belongs to etc.).Edges represent the connections between the nodes, and might hold properties as well (such as weight representing the strength of the connection, direction in case of asymmetric relation or time if applicable).