Social Network Analysis. Группа авторов

the old graph analysis strategies [8].

Email network, collaboration network, and telephone network are the various types of social networks. However, recent online social networks, like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, have gained increased popularity within a short period with a greater number of users. It was found with a survey that Facebook has crossed more than 500 million users in the year 2010 [8]. Social media acts as a highly recognized platform with rich source of data assisting well in the field of marketing of various brands, responding to changes in marketing, enhancing the brands through promotion, and eventually attaining a large number of customers [9–11]. In particular, the role of social network is very important in the area of healthcare applications. As such, the healthcare sector requires discovering new traditions to control the provider practice and measure the best practices to satisfy and improve the health outcomes. Social network analysis (SNA) concentrates on evaluating the relation among individuals, who are attached by one or more knot of interdependency, like friendship, love, trust, cooperation, or communication. Social network analysis can provide imminent into evaluating and understanding the specialized networks of communication and, hence, developing effective interventions in the network to enhance the performance of the provider and eventually, the outcomes related to health [12]. The diagrammatic representation of SNA is shown in Figure 1.1.

      For illustration, let us consider that the application of online social network in analyzing the contagious diseases originated with the biological pathogens, such as influenza, chickenpox, measles, and the sexually spread viruses that transfer from one person to another [13–15].

Figure 1.1 Social network analysis.

      Recent studies have observed the prologue of a number of SNA models that try to clarify how opinions develop in a population [16], with the consideration of a number of social theories. These models possess a number of common characteristics with that of the spreading and epidemics. Generally, people are considered as agents with a certain state and attached by a social network. The social links is indicated using a complete graph or with more sensible complex networks. The state of the node is typically identified using the variables, which can either be discrete or continuous, with the probability to select either one or another option [17]. The nature of individuals varies with respect to time, depending on a number of update rules, mainly with the interaction of neighbors.

1.2 Important Tools for the Collection and Analysis of Online Network Data

In the recent years, the SNA has attained more concentration in various fields of research, which is because of the flexibility in operation provided by the graph theory that is involved in reducing the countless phenomena to a basic analytical form in terms of bricks and nodes. Certainly, the social relations, transportation, trading, communication strategies, and even the brain can be framed as a network and can be analyzed. This assists in the visibility of the studies related to network analysis, leading to be advantageous in education centers, academies, and universities particularly, healthcare. A number of tools were developed to make it available to a large amount of people. The SNA library and the graphical tools are made available to physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and so on. The SNA, being an active area of research, can also be used for unfolding human interactions and opinion diffusions. More number of dedicated tools and libraries are available even for certain peculiar applications. However, it is a time-consuming process to select the appropriate tool for a particular task, making it inconvenient for the users.

      Some of the openly available tools and libraries are discussed in this section. A multilevel solution aiming on epidemic spreading simulation is represented as Network diffusion library (NDlib), which possesses a number of significant features and is available highly to the SNA practitioners as compared with other tools. Unlike other tools, the NDlib tool is accessible to technicians, like researchers, programmers, and to non-technicians, like students and analysts. NDlib helps in rectifying the drawbacks associated with the existing libraries with reduced complexity in usage. The three elements of the generic diffusion process are the graph topology, the diffusion model, and the configuration of the model.

The configuration of the model is devised in such a way to provide the final user with negligible and logical interface to choose the diffusion processes. The simulation configuration interface finally permits the user to completely indicate the three different groups of data, such as the model-specific parameters, the attributes of nodes and edges, and finally, the preliminary condition of the epidemic process. The configuration model has an important role in library logic in such a way that it concentrates on the description of the experiment, thus leading the definition of the simulation logical over all the models [18]. The next significant software package is the NetworKit [19], which generally provide the graph algorithms, and is efficient in analyzing the capabilities of the network. It involves balancing certain combination of strength with its two-layer hybrid feature aware code [12]. Figure 1.2 illustrates the SNA using Python.

      Social Network Importer: The SN organization is a module for NodeXL6, which is the unrestrained Excel 2010/2007 format for dissecting organization in the well-known Excel application software circumstance. The Bernie Hogan of Oxford Internet Institute delineates the NameGen7, which is considered as the antecedent of SN organization [20].

Social Network Organization Importer: SN organization makes inquiries to Facebook Administration Programming Interface (API) and permits the extortion of inner self-organization information for a provided Facebook client. Contingent upon account protection settings for conscience and revamp, the apparatus will likewise gather Facebook portrait information and restore the 1.5 degree sense of self-organization. As per the Facebook API protocols and regulation, the information must be gathered for a conscience who has given their Facebook username and secret word, and henceforth Social Network Importer is as of now basically valuable for analysts who need to gather their own inner self-organization information or that of few members who might have to utilize NodeXL on a machine that influence scientific approaches. In contradiction, NameGen is accessible as an application of Facebook, and it has permitted the designers of NameGen to gather a sense of self-organization information for individuals who assented to take part in the evaluation, where the assent was conceded by means of the establishment and utilization of the NameGen Facebook implementation. Although the SN Importer effectively conceals the interaction between the researcher and the Facebook API, the Tweepy Python library established for Twitter API is significantly more truncated level in that its utilization requires the specialist to have the option to program in Python [21]. Common utilization of Tweepy may include the specialist questioning the Twitter Search API to track down all new tweets that consist of a specific hashtag.

Figure 1.2 Social network analysis using Python.

      The API of the twitter clients is then utilized to accumulate the administered assistant network of the writer of the tweets. The Communal Online SM observatory Observant (COSMOS) organization that contributes a consolidated set of devices for gathering, documenting, exploring, and envisage the data streams in the social network, along with the ability to connect with the variant types of data, such as the data from UK ONS (organization of national statistics) through the extended APIs [22, 23].

      The COSMOS holds a scope of demographic devises which comprised of gender recognition, stress, topic realization, language identification, location identification, and emotion recognition. The initial description of the COSMOS organization is being accessible for transfer from