Effective and Efficient Methodologies for Social Network Analysis

Performing social network analysis (SNA) requires a set of powerful techniques to analyze structural information contained in interactions between social entities. Many SNA technologies and methodologies have been developed and have successfully provided significant insights for small-scale interactions. However, these techniques are not suitable for analyzing large social networks, which are very popular and important in various fields and have special structural properties that cannot be obtained from small networks or their analyses. There are a number of issues that need to be further studied in the design of current SNA techniques. A number of key issues can be embodied in three fundamental and critical challenges: long processing time, large computational resource requirements, and network dynamism. In order to address these challenges, we discuss an anytime-anywhere methodology based on a parallel/distributed computational framework to effectively and efficiently analyze large and dynamic social networks. In our methodology, large social networks are decomposed into intra-related smaller parts. A coarse-level of network analysis is built based on comprehensively analyzing each part. The partial analysis results are incrementally refined over time. Also, during the analyses process, network dynamic changes are effectively and efficiently adapted based on the obtained results. In order to evaluate and validate our methodology, we implement our methodology for a set of SNA metrics which are significant for SNA applications and cover a wide range of difficulties. Through rigorous theoretical and experimental analyses, we