Social Network Analysis

Course Objectives

Networks are a fundamental tool for modeling complex social, technological, and biological systems. Coupled with the emergence of online social networks and large-scale data availability in social sciences, this course focuses on the analysis of massive networks which provide many computational, algorithmic, and modeling challenges. The course will cover recent research on the structure and analysis of such large networks and on models and algorithms that abstract their basic properties. We will explore how to practically analyze large-scale network data and how to reason about it through models for network structure and evolution. Topics covered in this course include how information spreads through society, robustness and fragility of networks, algorithms for the World Wide Web, prediction and recommendation in online social networks, representation learning for large networks, etc.

Pre-requisites

• Python programming (mandatory)

•  Algorithms and Data Structure (mandatory)

•  Introduction to Machine Learning (optional)

•  Introduction to Deep Learning (optional)

Course Outline

• Course introduction and structure of Graphs

•  Measuring networks and random graph models

•  Network analysis and visualization tools

•  Link analysis

•  Community detection in graphs

•  Link prediction

•  Network effects and Cascade behavior

•  Influence maximization and Outbreak detection

•  Graph Representation Learning

•  Graph Convolutional Networks

•  Other applications of networks

Instructors

1.  Sougata Mukherjea 

2.   Tanmoy Chakraborty

Teaching Assistant

1.  Anwoy Chatterjee 

Class Schedule and Location

• Timings: Monday and Thursday, 8:00 - 9:30AM [Slot-A]

• Classroom: IIA-201

• Group email: 2301-ELL880@courses.iitd.ac.in

Piazza Link

https://piazza.com/iit_delhi/fall2023/ell880 

Assessment Plan (tentative)

Suggested Textbook

• Tanmoy Chakraborty. Social Network Analysis, Wiley India Pvt. Ltd., 2021, ISBN 978-81-265-2007-7. 

[Amazon link: https://www.amazon.in/Social-Network-Analysis-Tanmoy-Chakraborty/dp/9354247830/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=9789354247835&qid=1634206218&sr=8-2 ]

Optional Readings

• Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World by David Easley and Jon Kleinberg, Cambridge University Press 2010 [online: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/ ]

•  Research papers published in SIGKDD, The WebConf, ACL, ICDM, CIKM, etc. as discussed in the class