Unit V
VISUALIZATION AND APPLICATIONS OF SOCIAL NETWORKS
Graph theory - Centrality - Clustering - Node-Edge Diagrams - Matrix
representation - Visualizing online social networks, Visualizing social
networks with matrix-based representations - Matrix and Node-Link
Diagrams - Hybrid representations - Applications - Cover networks -
Community welfare - Collaboration networks - Co-Citation networks
Introduction
• Social networks are built when actors belonging to different social
groups are connected to each other.
• Sociograms used to represent social networks and started to explore
the social relations in a formal study.
Graph Theory
• Study of graphs, which are mathematical structures used to model
pair wise relations between objects.
• Node degree:
The degree of a node in a graph is the number of edges incident
to the node.
Graph Theory
• Node density:
It is a graph in which the number of edges is close to the maximal
number of edges.
Graph Theory
• Path length:
Path length is the number of edges in the sequence that a walk
follows.
• Component size:
Counted by the number of connected nodes in a graph.
Centrality
• Centrality - measure indicating the importance of node in the
network.
• Measure of centrality - used to give a rough indication of the social
power of a node based on how well they connect the network.
• Centrality for ranking:
1. HITS analyzes the important nodes based on calculating
Authorities (indegrees) and Hubs (outdegrees)
2. PageRank calculates node values based on out-degrees.
Centrality
• Methods to measure the centrality of a social network:
1. Degree
2. Betweenness
3. Closeness
• Degree centrality:
• number of edges incident upon a node
Centrality
• Betweenness centrality:
• computing the extent to which a node lies between other nodes in the
network
• measure the connectivity of the neighbors of a node and to give a higher
value for nodes which bridge clusters
Centrality
• Closeness centrality:
• how distant a node is to the other nodes in the network.
• Farness of a node is the sum of its distances to all other nodes.
Clustering
• refers to a group of nodes having denser relations.
Matrix Representations
• Minimize the occlusion problems caused by the node-edge diagram.
• matrix-based representation:
• clusters and associations among the nodes can also be better discovered
when the number of nodes increases.
Visualizing Online Social Networks
• according to the attributes of network sociality to present their
network structure.
• Analyzed:
• Web communities.
• email groups
• digital libraries,
• and Web 2.0 services.
Visualizing social networks with matrix-
based representations
• Matrix or Node-Link Diagram
• Advantages of matrices:
1. Matrices provide powerful overview visualization.
2. Matrices do not suffer from node overlapping.
3. Matrices do not suffer from link crossing each other.
4. Matrices show all possible pairs of vertices.
5. Matrices are particularly appropriate for directed and dense networks.
Visualizing social networks with matrix-
based representations
• Advantages of node-link diagrams:
1. These representations are familiar to a wide audience; they
constitute a powerful communication tool.
2. For small or sparse networks, node-link diagrams were more
effective than matrices.
3. The space used by matrices is larger than the space to display
node-link diagrams. Therefore, node-link diagrams provide a compact
representations.
4. Node-link diagrams are more appropriate to perform a
number of path-related tasks
Visualizing social networks with matrix-
based representations
• Matrix + Node-Link Diagrams:
Following are the steps to combine matrices and node-link diagrams.
Initiate the exploration
Explore interactively and iteratively
Find a consensus in the data or validate an hypothesis
Present the findings
Hybrid Representations
• Two hybrid representations were developed namely,
1. MatLink - augment a standard matrix representation with links on its
borders.
2. NodeTrix - a hybrid visualization merging node-link diagrams and matrices
NodeTrix developed a number of interactions based on traditional drag-
and-drop of objects with the mouse cursor for ease creation, exploration and
edition of matrices.
Applications of Social Network Analysis