Social Network Analysis

Lorraine D Almeida

Social Network
A set of nodes
(actors)
- Persons
- Groups
-Organizations
- Objects
A set of relationships
- is a friend of
-is a neighbor of

Different levels of analysis

Ego-network
- Have data on a respondent (ego) and the
people they are connected to (alters).
- May include estimates of connections
among alters
Partial network
- Ego networks plus some amount of
tracing to reach contacts of contacts
- Something less than full account of
connections among all pairs of actors in
the relevant population
Complete or Global data
- Data on all actors within a particular
(relevant) boundary
- Never exactly complete (due to missing
data), but boundaries are set

Handling large networks

Some networks may be too large to
analyze
Sampling or filtering may be
important.

Snowball Sampling
When working with a large network
choose a starting node (seed node).
Get that node, their connections and
so on until the network is the right
size for analysis.
Cons : Biased towards the part of the
network sampled, may miss other
features.
Benefits: Easy to do, common.

Random sampling
Randomly selects certain percentage of
nodes and keep all edges between them or
Randomly select a certain percentage of
edges and keep all nodes that are
mentioned
Cons
- Edge sampling biased toward high degree
nodes.
- Node sampling loses some structural
characteristics.

Egocentric Network Analysis

Instead of looking at the whole
network, look at the egocentric
network of some nodes.
It shows the role of an individual in
the context.

Types of social networks according to

Number of sets of actors
- One mode: one set of actors
- Two mode: (bi-partite , affiliation networks) two
sets of actors

Relationships
- Directed or undirected
- Valued or unvalued (0/1)

How are they built

- Complete networks
- Ego networks

One mode or two mode networks

The number of modes in a network refers to the number of
distinct kinds of social entities in the network

One mode
All nodes are of the same
type
Students

Two mode
Nodes belong to two sets
Administrators
Societies

Directed vs Undirected graphs

Directed
Edges are oriented

Undirected
Edges are not
oriented

Weighted ( valued ) vs Unvalued graphs

Weighted/Valued
Edges have values

Unvalued
Edges have no
value

Network Measures
Metrics for Networks

Metrics for whole networks

Density
Average Degree
Average Distance
Diameter

Density
A networks density is the ratio of the
number of edges in the network over
the total number of possible edges
between all pairs of nodes (which is
n(n-1)/2, where n is the number of
vertices ,for an undirected graph)

Density (of edges) for an undirected graph

Density d= number of effective

edges/ number of possible edges

Density (of edges) for a directed graph

Reciprocal edges count twice

 Average Degree
Average number of links per Person

Average Distance
Average geodesic distance between
all pairs of nodes

Adjacency matrix for a directed

graph
The adjacency matrix X =[Xab]
for G is a matrix with n rows
and n columns and entries
given by
Xab= 1 if (a,b) is an edge in G
0 otherwise
Adjacency matrix :
0110
1001
0000
0100

Diameter of the graph

Diameter= Maximum distance
between any pair of nodes
Here D=7

Network Measures
Centrality Measures

Centrality Measures

Distance
Degree Centrality
Closeness Centrality
Betweenness Centrality
Eigenvector Centrality & Pagerank

Distance
A geodesic is the shortest path
between two vertices.
The distance from vertex u to vertex
v is the length of the geodesic from u
to v.

Degree Centrality
The simplest indicator of centrality is
the number of its neighbors (degree
in a simple undirected network)
It measures how important is a node
with respect to its nearest neighbors
The degree centrality of a node is its
degree

Degree in an undirected graph

For a node, degree = number of
edges

In- and Out degree in an undirected graph

In degree : Number of edges coming

into the node
Out degree: Number of edges coming
out of the node

Path
Sequence of edges connecting two
nodes
From A -> E two possible paths,
ABCE or ABDE

Path : Example in an undirected graph

From D -> E two possible paths,
DE or DBCE
Geodesic distance : Length of
shortest path

Betweenness Centrality

Measure of a node's influence.

Percentage of shortest paths that
include a given node.
Persons , that connect two in other
respects unconnected
subpopulations, are actors with a
high betweenness centrality score.

Betweenness Centrality
For a graph with n vertices, the betweenness for vertex is computed as
follows:
1.For each pair of vertices (s,t), compute all shortest paths between
them.
2. For each pair of vertices (s,t), determine the fraction of shortest paths
that pass through the vertex in question (here, vertex v).
3. Sum this fraction over all pairs of vertices (s,t).

Closeness centrality
Closeness is based on the length of
the average shortest path between a
node and all other nodes in the
network
Normalized Closeness Centrality:

Closeness Centrality

Cc(n3)= 11/23

Eigenvector Centrality
Measure of nodes importance.
Iterative matrix computation that gives more weight to
nodes if they are connected to influential nodes.
Backbone to techniques like Googles Pagerank which
ranks webpages.
Node has high score if connected to many nodes are
themselves well connected
Computed as:

where A is adjacency matrix and V is eigenvector

centrality.
V is the principal eigenvector of A.

Eigenvector Centrality
Eigenvector centrality Is like a recursive version of
degree centrality. The basic algorithm is as follows:
1. Start by assigning centrality score of 1 to all nodes
(v_i = 1 for all i in the network)
2. Recompute scores of each node as weighted sum of
centralities of all nodes in a node's neighborhood.
3. Normalize v by dividing each value by the largest
value
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 until values of v stop
changing.

Centralization
Degree centralization of a network is
the variation in the degrees of
vertices divided by the maximum
degree variation which is possible in
a networks of the same size.
Freemans general formula for
centralization

Network Measures

Cohesion and Connectivity

Minimum number of
nodes to remove
before the network
becomes disconnected.
Cohesion increases as
the number of
independent paths in
the network increases. Network with low cohesion
Ties through a single
person are minimally
cohesive.

Reciprocity
With symmetric data two actors
are either connected or not.
With directed data there are four
possible dyadic relationships:
-A and B are not connected
-A sends to B
-B sends to A
-A and B send to each other.
The ratio of the number of
relations which are reciprocated
(i.e. there is an edge in both
directions) over the total number
of relations in the network
Here it is .

Transitivity
Measures a tendency for a tie from A
to C to exist if a tie from A to B and a
tie from B to C exist.
If A B & B C & A C then the
three are transitive.
Networks with high level of
transitivity are often more stable,
balanced, harmonious

Clustering
Measures a tendency towards dense
local neighborhoods
Neighborhood: other nodes to which ego is
connected.
Size of the neighborhood: the number of
potential connection among the nodes in the
neighborhood.

Nodes clustering coefficient:

Density of ties between nodes directly adjacent to it, excluding the ties
to the node itself.
A has two neighbors B and C. They make one pair (BC), and
have one tie between them. The density of the network
consisting of B and C is 1/1=1.
B the same for B
C has three potential pairs in its neighbors: AB,AD, BD.
Density of the network consisting of these nodes is 1/3

Why and when to use SNA?

SNA is a useful tool for visualising connections.
Allows comparison between different networks.
Statistical calculations can be used to obtain
quantitative data from a social network.
Isolates the connections from organisational
structures to focus on how people are connected to
each other.
SNA can be combined with other forms of analysis,
such as content or discourse analysis, to understand
the nature of connections and how information flows
in a network as well as the content of the
communication across the network.