Network Analytics

Catalog description

This course is about how the social, technological, and natural worlds are connected, how technology illuminates and shapes these connections, creating fascinating new networked data sets and associated analytics, how the study of networks sheds light on and enables modeling these connections, and how networks enabled by digital technologies are leading to the emergence of new institutions and market forms. While one’s “social network” is now associated by many with the popularity of digitally mediated social media, we have always been creatures of our networks—whether those networks involve family, villages, tribes, or Facebook—and our socioeconomic evolution has been molded by the possibilities for exchange that they create. Over our lessons, we will explore the fascinating world of networks, what digital systems reveal about the connections between people, information and technology, the analytics of networks, and how we can model and analyze the rich population-scale networked data sets that digital technologies are making available to us. Topics may include network models of the contagion of pathogens like COVID-19; social network structure and its effects on business and culture; how the structural properties of networks help us understand social capital, power and modern institutions; the influence of networks on access to and propagation of information and fads; power laws; leveraging information networks for web search; the melding of networks, machine learning, and technology into the platform economy. The course is organized as six lessons - Lesson 1: Network Basics - Lesson 2: Measuring Tie Strength and Trust in Social Networks - Lesson 3: Modeling and Interpreting Network Position, Structure and Statistics - Lesson 4: Identifying and Measuring Contagion in Networks - Lesson 5: Epidemiological Models of Contagion - Lesson 6: Network Effects, Platform…