Exponential Random Graph Models For Social Networks

This book provides an account of the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of exponential random graph models (ERGMs).

This volume introduces the basic concepts of Exponential Random Graph Modeling (ERGM), gives examples of why it is used, and shows the reader how to conduct basic ERGM analyses in their own research. ERGM is a statistical approach to modeling social network structure that goes beyond the descriptive methods conventionally used in social network analysis. Although it was developed to handle the inherent non-independence of network data, the results of ERGM are interpreted in similar ways to logistic regression, making this a very useful method for examining social systems. Recent advances in statistical software have helped make ERGM accessible to social scientists, but a concise guide to using ERGM has been lacking. An Introduction to Exponential Random Graph Modeling, by Jenine K. Harris, fills that gap, by using examples from public health, and walking the reader through the process of ERGM model-building using R statistical software and the statnet package.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the International Workshop on Statistical Network Analysis: Models, Issues, and New Directions held in Pittsburgh, PA, USA in June 2006 as associated event of the 23rd International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2006. It covers probabilistic methods for network analysis, paying special attention to model design and computational issues of learning and inference.

This book demonstrates the application of network theory to the social organization of animals.

Networks are ubiquitous in science and have become a focal point for discussion in everyday life. Formal statistical models for the analysis of network data have emerged as a major topic of interest in diverse areas of study, and most of these involve a form of graphical representation. Probability models on graphs date back to 1959. Along with empirical studies in social psychology and sociology from the 1960s, these early works generated an active network community and a substantial literature in the 1970s. This effort moved into the statistical literature in the late 1970s and 1980s, and the past decade has seen a burgeoning network literature in statistical physics and computer science. The growth of the World Wide Web and the emergence of online networking communities such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, and a host of more specialized professional network communities has intensified interest in the study of networks and network data. Our goal in this review is to provide the reader with an entry point to this burgeoning literature. We begin with an overview of the historical development of statistical network modeling and then we introduce a number of examples that have been studied in the network literature. Our subsequent discussion focuses on a number of prominent static and dynamic network models and their interconnections. We emphasize formal model descriptions, and pay special attention to the interpretation of parameters and their estimation. We end with a description of some open problems and challenges for machine learning and statistics.

Pioneering introduction of unprecedented breadth and scope to inferential and statistical methods for network analysis.

This classroom-tested text is the definitive introduction to the mathematics of network science, featuring examples and numerous exercises.