1. IMPORTANT METRICS IN SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS.

Explain the important metrics in Social Network analysis.

Social networks are built when actors belonging to different social groups are
connected to each other. Some important metrics for network analysis are described
to give a brief overview of social network analysis.

Graph Theory
Node degree:
The degree of a node in a graph is the number of edges incident to the node.
If there are loops in the graph, the degree of a node will be counted twice.
Node density:
The density of an undirected graph can be defined as (2*E)/N*(N -1), where E
is the number of edges. On the other hand, the density of a directed graph can be defined
as E/N*(N-1).
Path length:
The path length is the number of edges in the sequence that a walk follows. In
a path, all nodes and edges appear only once in the sequence. Therefore, the path length
can be defined as the distances between pairs of nodes in a network graph, and
average path length is the average of these distances between all pairs of nodes.
Component size:
When the component size is concerned, a connected graph needs to be
discovered first since the component size is counted by the number of connected nodes
in a graph. A graph is connected if all pairs of nodes are reachable, and for each pair
of two nodes, one of them is reachable from the other.
Centrality
The measure of centrality is used to give a rough indication of the social power
of a node based on how well they connect the network. The distinction between the
three popular individual centrality measures: degree centrality, betweenness centrality,
and closeness centrality.
Degree centrality:
Degree centrality is defined as the number of edges incident upon a node,
and thus it is usually the first way to calculate the nodes that are most potential to
determine other nodes. For calculating degree centrality, the nodes that have direct
connections to a large number of nodes are considered. If the edges in a graph are
directed, the in-degree centrality is differentiated from the out-degree centrality.
Betweenness centrality:
Betweeness centrality is another key metrics for computing the extent to which
a node lies between other nodes in the network. If a node is the only node that links two
groups of nodes in the network, this node shall be seen as an important node for
keeping the social network together.

Closeness centrality:
The measure of closeness centrality is to take into account how distant a node
is to the other nodes in the network. Hence, closeness centrality is to measure the order
of magnitude that a node is near all other nodes in a social network by calculating the
mean shortest path for a node to all other nodes in the graph.

Clustering
Many social networks contain subsets of nodes that are highly connected within
the subset and have relatively few connections to nodes outside the subset. The nodes
in such subsets are likely to share some attributes and form their own communities. Since
the detection of these community structures is not trivial, to efficiently and effectively
discover such community structures is important.
Therefore, the main measure described below is to help explore the grouping
effects by clustering coefficient.
Clustering coefficient:
A clustering coefficient is to measure the degrees of nodes to decide which nodes
in a graph tend to be clustered together. Thus, the clustering coefficient measure is to
quantify how close its neighbors are to being a complete graph. As the nodes grouped
in the real-world social network tend to have relatively high density of ties, the clustering
coefficient is also utilized for small world analysis.

2. VISUALIZING ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORKS

Write in detail about Visualizing Online Social Networks
Versatile visualization skills are employed to facilitate analyzing online social
networks, and more in-depth studies have been investigated to improve thepresentation
of online social networks. When the attributes of sociality are concerned, online social
networks can be classified into different social communities. In addition, from the daily
social activities of various online social communities, social networks may evolve into
different patterns of social structure. Therefore, visualizations of online social networks
were developed according to the attributes of network sociality to present their network
structure.
Web Communities
The previous visualization of Web communities, the visualization techniques are
mainly introduced to deal with the complex social relationships based on human-

centric or user-centric views. The development of Semantic Web, a project called FOAF
(Friend-of-a-friend) was proposed to visualize such human-centric social relationships
based on Semantic Web social metadata. With XML/RDF format, the FOAF relations can
be explicitly defined for further social network analysis and visualization.
Entity Cube interface, Web entities are summarized from billions of Web pages with
a modest presence. Therefore, users can intuitively browse and determine the social
relationships among the returned entities.
Email Groups
In addition to the network view of email visualization, different aspects of social
networks can be visualized for analysis. Mail service is one of the most popular
applications that people often use to connect each other and deliver messages in their
daily lives. Personal online social networks are thus constructed through people’s daily
social interactions. For analyzing the social structures of the daily email activities,
visualization techniques are employed to explore different patterns.
Digital Libraries
The speed publishing of digital contents on the Web, social networks are fast
shaped among these electronic publications, particularly among the academic
publications. In digital libraries, social networks can be mainly analyzed from two
aspects: authors and writings.
 Co-Authorship Networks
Co-authorships can be mined from the existing publications and organize
the co-authorship networks. With the visualization of co-authorships, some
characteristics, such as clustering coefficient and average path length, can be
hence analyzed in co-authorship networks.
 Co-Citation Relations
The authorship view, social networks in digital libraries can be discovered
from the citations and co-citations among writings themselves. Since references
are a crucial part of a document for readers to obtain information source, co-
citation social networks can be formed through the continuously accumulated
publications. With proper visualization of co-citation networks, documents with
high impacts or similar citation patterns can be
 immediately identified, and the co-citation relationships can be intuitively
observed as well.
Web 2.0 Services
To improve the interlaced visualization problem caused by the node-edge
representation, visual icons and user photos are further employed in the Facebook
visualization. In addition to visualizations mentioned above, there are still versatile
visualization applications developed to help people access social networks over Web
2.0 services. With the progress of visualization technologies, we can foresee that the
immense information on the Web can be friendlier presented to people. Social network
analysis on Web 2.0 communities can benefit from these advances as well.

3. VISUALIZING SOCIAL NETWORKS WITH MATRIX BASED

REPRESENTATION.
Explain about Visualizing social networks with matrix based representation.
Matrices or node-link diagrams both have advantages and drawbacks
for visualizing social networks.
Matrix or Node-Link Diagram
Matrix and node-link diagrams have different properties making them suitable
representations for different tasks and datasets. Building from these results and our
experience, we attempt to list the main advantages of each representation in the
following paragraph.
The advantages of matrices:
1. Matrices provide powerful overview visualization since the time to create them is low
and since they are always readable. They constitute a good representation to initiate an
exploration.
2. Matrices do not suffer from node overlapping, if the task requires to always read the
actors’ labels, this representation is more appropriate.
3. Matrices do not suffer from link crossing each other; therefore they are available
alternative for dense networks.
4. Matrices show all possible pairs of vertices, they can highlight the lack of connections
and also the directedness of the connections. They are particularly appropriate for
directed and dense networks.
Matrix + Node-Link Diagrams:
To combine advantages of both representations and to support the visual
exploration of social networks.
To conceive this system, we observed and discussed with a small group of social
scientists. We divided their analysis process in four main stages. For each, we describe
how matrices and node-link diagrams can be combined to achieve the best of both
worlds.
1. Initiate the exploration
2. Explore interactively and iteratively
3. Find a consensus in the data or validate an hypothesis
4. Present the findings
Initiate Exploration
The main advantage of matrices is to always provide a readable representation
of a network even when it is very large. Associated to their low rendering time, these
two properties make them suitable representations to initiate the exploration.
Glancing at the names of the actors reveal that this patterns is associated with
the administrative service, dealing with travels of the whole institutions and thus,
communicating with many persons in the network.
Explore Interactively
To interactively manipulate matrix and node-link representations, we provide the
following set of tools:
1. Interactive specification of visual attributes. The user controls the mapping data visual
encoding by entering values in a text field or selecting a value in a list. Visual attributes
of nodes, rows or columns such as label, color, transparency or size as well as
attributes of links or cells such as thickness, color or texture may be associated to a
data attribute.
2. Interactive layout and reordering. Users may directly move a node or arow/column
in both representations to change its position or order.
3. Automatic layout and reordering techniques. Since laying out node-link diagrams
or reordering large matrices by hand may be extremely tedious, we provide algorithms
to automate layouts and reordering’s. These techniques vary in their computation time
and quality. As we mentioned earlier, it is difficult to identify the appropriate techniques
apriori, thus we provide users with several.
4. Computer-assisted layout and reordering techniques. We developed tools to support
reordering, allowing users to apply layout and reordering algorithms to specific subsets
of the network.
5. Interactive filtering. This functionality allows filtering actors or connections according
to a selection or by selecting a specific value of a data attribute from a list (such as age
or sex for example). Using the principle of dynamic queries, the system provides dynamic
feedback when the user modifies the parameters of the filter.
6. Interactive clustering. Once groups of actors are identified, we provide a simple
mechanism to mark them and associate them to a visual attributed such as the color
or shape of the nodes.
7. Overview + Detail techniques to navigate in both representations. To support
navigation in large visual spaces, we propose two techniques providing focus + detail.
We provide a bird’s eye view to navigate and a fisheye lens to magnify regions of
interest for details. We also provide a Tree map to represent the macrostructure of the
network and providing a fast filtering mechanism to isolate each connected component
of the network.
Present Findings
While matrix representations may prove effective when exploring largenetworks,
node-link diagrams are essential to communicate findings to a wide audience. Many
node-link diagrams may be created for presenting results with different filters and
possibly different aggregations. To ease this process. Matrix Explorer allows users to
generate pictures while performing the exploration.

4. COVERT NETWORK AND COMMUNITY WELFARE.

Explain briefly about (i) Covert Network.
(ii) Community welfare.
(i) Covert Networks
The covert networks are hidden, the actors of such network does not disclose
their information to the external world. Covert groups have cellular networks structure
which is different from hierarchical organizations. The terrorist and criminal networks are
good examples of such networks. Generally, the information about actors, relationship
among them and involvement in any external event is not easily available in terrorist
networks. SNA has been successfully applied to such domainsto understand covert
cell operations and their organization. Intelligence analysis
normally focused on the identification of network vulnerabilities within the different types
and forms of criminal networks. Hence, combating terrorism is another field where SNA
techniques have important and successful application. SNA has been used to
understand the communication and structure of terrorist cells. SNA is applied on
terrorism database for predicting node and link, discovering interesting patternsand
actors involved in an event. In this context, SNA discovers who is central within
organizations, which individual’s removal would most effectively disrupt the network,
what roles individuals are playing, and which relationships are vital to monitor. Another
vital application of SNA for terrorist database is to predict terrorism activities. Terrorist
organizations have special structures on recruitment, evolution, and ideas diffusion in
network. SNA tools have been used to identify these organization structures and provide
critical information for terrorist detection and terrorism prediction.
(ii) Community Welfare
The SNA techniques are not limited to scientific and research areas, rather also
used to improve the community welfare. SNA is used to analyze different types of
relations such as communication patterns, physical contacts, sexual relationship etc.
The SNA may reveal the patterns of human contact which may lead to spread of
disease such as HIV in population. Considerable research has been done to analyze
the spread of disease. It has been employed in epidemiology and has shown
considerable results for community improvement. Another interesting application is to
use SNA to examine and observe farm animal network to identify patterns of disease
spread from one animal to another. Mass surveillance is one of the modern practices
undertaken by some organizations and governments to monitor the behavior of
suspected people of population. This is done with the purpose of protecting people
from criminals, terrorists or political subversives to maintain social control. In US, the
Total Information Awareness program of the Information Awareness Office designed
numerous technologies to be used to perform mass surveillance which made use of
SNA tools.
 5. COLLABORATION NETWORK AND CO-CITATION WELFARE.
Explain briefly about (i) Collaboration Network.
(ii) Co-Citation welfare.

Collaboration Network
Collaboration network consists groups of persons working together to perform
particular activity and studying human collaboration is an important topic in sociology.
The widely studied collaboration network by researchers in context of SNs is science
Co-authorship collaboration network and movie actor collaboration networks. The co-
authorship network is analyzed by various researchers to study dynamics in patterns of
interactions between educational entities or communities. Further, these types of
networks are analyzed to understand the influence of individual researchers. The
structure of research collaboration in various scientific fields is disclosed by applying
SNA methods to collaboration network of scientists or researchers which helps for
strategic planning of research and development. SNA also identifies the most
prominent actors in particular subject area and reveals their ego networks. The
observations and results of time series and location- b a s e d analysis captures the
nature and characteristics of research subject over time and location. This helps to
identify the scope of research discipline at particular location so that further new
inventions in same can be promoted at respective region and using skills of subject
experts.
Development of such dynamic network is observed by using SNA
techniques. The required datasets for co-authorship network analysis is mostly
extracted from sources including scientific journals, bibliographic records and digital
libraries. The important SNA measures used for co-authorship network include
cohesion, network density and centrality. The cohesion is used to identify the subgroups
within network with respect to each research subject. The node similarity measure in
this context represents extend of similar subject skills. This will help to identify group of
persons to engage in particular research knowing few expertise in that area. The
identified hub in sub-network can represent the key researcher in that sub-network. The
scope and popularity of particular subject in its evolution is measured by computing
density over time and location.
Co-Citation Networks
In the area of analysis and computation, Co-citation is used as a measure of
similarity between two objects. Co-citation analysis helps to understand the status and
structure of scientific research. Basic two approaches of co-citation are author co-
citation and document co-citation. The Co-citation network can be viewed as a bipartite
graph showing linkage between two different groups of documents. Basic application of
co-citation analysis is to study the scientific communication. This reveals the research
network consisting of different institutions linked to each other informally by having
indicators to each other’s documents/papers which can be used to get group of
institutes having similar ongoing research. This may help to promote further research in
respective area in those institutions.
The node similarity measure is used to find similarity between two articles or
publications. In this case, the nodes represent papers and existence of link shows that
two articles were cited in other articles. As we have seen in above sections, the centrality
measure can also be used for co-citation analysis.