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Discovering Sets of Key Players in Social Networks

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Computational Social Network Analysis

Part of the book series: Computer Communications and Networks ((CCN))

Abstract

The discovery of single key players in social networks is commonly done using some of the centrality measures employed in social network analysis. However, few methods, aimed at discovering sets of key players, have been proposed in the literature. This chapter presents a brief survey of such methods. The methods described include a variety of techniques ranging from those based on traditional centrality measures using optimizing criteria to those based on measuring the efficiency of a network. Additionally, we describe and evaluate a new approach to discover sets of key players based on entropy measures. Finally, this chapter presents a brief description of some applications of information theory within social network analysis.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The use of cliques to model social groups has been criticized by some authors (e.g. [1, 2]) due to the strict mathematical definition of cliques.

  2. 2.

    A similar figure is used in [12].

  3. 3.

    The complexity is calculated assuming that an adjacency matrix is used to represent the graph, other implementations using other more efficient data structure representations perform better.

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Correspondence to Daniel Ortiz-Arroyo .

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Ortiz-Arroyo, D. (2010). Discovering Sets of Key Players in Social Networks. In: Abraham, A., Hassanien, AE., Sná¿el, V. (eds) Computational Social Network Analysis. Computer Communications and Networks. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84882-229-0_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84882-229-0_2

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  • Print ISBN: 978-1-84882-228-3

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