"An Introduction to Statistical Models for Network Science"

Social network analysis focuses on relationships between social entities. It is used widely in the social and behavioral sciences, as well as in political science, economics, organizational science, and industrial engineering. The social network perspective, which will be taught in this workshop, has been developed over the last sixty years by researchers in psychology, sociology, and anthropology, and more recently, to a lesser extent, in physics.

The social network paradigm is gaining recognition and standing in the general social and behavioral science communities as the theoretical basis for examining social structures. This basis has been clearly defined by many theorists, and the paradigm convincingly applied to important substantive problems. However, the paradigm requires a new and different set of concepts and analytic tools, beyond those provided by standard quantitative (particularly, statistical) methods. This lecture will present an introduction to various concepts, methods, and applications of social network analysis drawn from the social, behavioral, and political sciences. The primary focus of these methods is the analysis of relational data measured on groups of social actors.

Of primary interest in this lecture are statistical models for networks, and how they can be applied to the behavioral sciences.