Network science: an introduction to recent statistical approaches

Network science 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 has been developed over the last sixty years by researchers in psychology, sociology, and anthropology, and morerecently, to a lesser extent, in physics. Network science 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. These concepts and tools are the topics of this talk.