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***** To join INSNA, visit http://www.insna.org ***** Thank you! Very interesting, but I am confused about how to apply this type of approach when the data available is not only missing, but may be missing due to some systematic collection bias. -----Original Message----- From: Social Networks Discussion Forum [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Barry Wellman Sent: Friday, December 11, 2009 6:27 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: [SOCNET] getting the "true" network ***** To join INSNA, visit http://www.insna.org ***** no theory needed Barry Wellman _______________________________________________________________________ S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology, FRSC NetLab Director Department of Sociology 725 Spadina Avenue, Room 388 University of Toronto Toronto Canada M5S 2J4 twitter:barrywellman http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman fax:+1-416-978-3963 Updating history: http://chass.utoronto.ca/oldnew/cybertimes.php _______________________________________________________________________ Facebook (and Systems Biologists) Take Note: Network Analysis Reveals True Connections Northwestern University News Center (IL) (12/07/09) Fellman, Megan Northwestern University researchers Roger Guimera and Marta Sales-Pardo have developed a universal method that can correctly analyze a variety of complex networks. The researchers tested their method on a range of five networks: a karate club, a social network of dolphins, the neural network of a worm, the air transportation network of Eastern Europe, and the metabolic network of Escherichia coli. For each of the five networks, the researchers introduced errors and applied an algorithm to the distorted network. Each time, the algorithm created a new network with the errors separated out, and each new network construction was closer to the original true network. "The flexibility of our approach, along with its generality and its performance, will make it applicable to many areas where network data reliability is a source of concern," say Guimera and Sales-Pardo. The central idea to the new method is that, even though every network has unique characteristics, they all have nodes that can be put into specific groups, with the nodes connecting to each other based on group membership. The method averages all possible groupings of the nodes and gives each group a weight that reflects its explanatory power. "There are many ways to map nodes in a network, not just one," says Sales-Pardo. "We consider all the possible ways. By taking the sum of them all, we can identify both missing and spurious connections." http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2009/12/networks.html _____________________________________________________________________ SOCNET is a service of INSNA, the professional association for social network researchers (http://www.insna.org). To unsubscribe, send an email message to [log in to unmask] containing the line UNSUBSCRIBE SOCNET in the body of the message. _____________________________________________________________________ SOCNET is a service of INSNA, the professional association for social network researchers (http://www.insna.org). To unsubscribe, send an email message to [log in to unmask] containing the line UNSUBSCRIBE SOCNET in the body of the message.