Reference about social network data-mining

Question

I am not in the data science field, but I would like to examine in depth this field and, particularly, I would like to start from the analysis of the social networks data.

I am trying to find some good references, both paper, websites and books, in order to start learning about the topic. Browsing on the internet, one can find a lot of sites, forum, papers about the topic, but I'm not able to discriminate among good and bad readings.

I am an R, Matlab, SAS user and I know a little bit of python language.

Could you suggest any references from which I could start studying and deepen the industry?

Answer 1

My favorite place to find information about social network analysis is from SNAP, the Stanford Network Analysis Project. Led by Jure Leskovec, this team of students and professors has built software tools, gathered data sets, and published papers on social network analysis.

http://snap.stanford.edu/

The collection of research papers there is outstanding.

They also have a Python tool you could try. http://snap.stanford.edu/snappy/index.html

The focus is on graph analysis, because social networks fit this model well. If you are new to graph analysis, I suggest you take a undergraduate level discrete mathematics course, or check out my favorite book on the topic "Graph Theory with Algorithms and its Applications" by Santanu Ray.

For a hands-on approach to social network analysis, check out "Mining the Social Web" by Matthew A Russell. It has examples which cover how to collect and analyze data from the major social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

It was Jure Leskovec who initially excited me about this field. He has many great talks on YouTube, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmQ_3nijMCs

Answer 2

I'm going to pursue the following series of online courses on the Coursera: Become a Social Scientist: Methods and Statistics by University of Amsterdam. The good news - it is free, or you can get a nice-looking certificate for $49 or so. The bad news - the nearest enrollment is Aug 31st 2015. You will have opportunity to get a lot of information in condensed way during a short time frame and you will be enforced to actually apply the knowledge in exercises, quizzes and project assignments. You will also have opportunity to discuss lessons/projects on the forum with many other students and lecturers.

[update] I apologize, I just remembered there is another course Introduction to Statistics for the Social Sciences by University of Zurich - just started April 28th, 2015. If you want to pursue it - do not forget about deadlines for quizzes and homeworks. Good luck!

Answer 3

I think Social Media Mining: An Introduction by Zafarani et. al. is an excellent starting point. You can find more about it here. Also a free PDF version is available.

It first goes through the essentials in graph theory and data mining. It covers some more advanced topics in graph mining, social network analysis, recommendation systems, etc.

Besides, I have seen some online courses in coursera (example). I am not sure about their quality though.

Finally, note that social network analysis is data mining for the social media data like Facebook. It is not social science at all; it is computer science. While you may end up borrowing some ideas from them, what you will end up doing is far from what social science guys are doing. So, going through social science courses and books is likely not a good idea at this point.

P.S. The book is the text book for the social media mining course offered in my university.

Answer 4

A good introductory course for social network analysis : https://www.coursera.org/course/sna