Statistical Analysis of Network Data with R

by Eric Kolaczyk, Gabor Csardi

Networks have permeated everyday life through everyday realities like the Internet, social networks, and viral marketing. As such, network analysis is an important growth area in the quantitative sciences, with roots in social network analysis going back to the 1930s and graph theory going back centuries. Measurement and analysis are integral components of network research. As a result, statistical methods play a critical role in network analysis. This book is the first of its kind in network research. It can be used as a stand-alone resource in which multiple R packages are used to illustrate how to conduct a wide range of network analyses, from basic manipulation and visualization, to summary and characterization, to modeling of network data. The central package is igraph , which provides extensive capabilities for studying network graphs in R. This text builds on Eric D. Kolaczyk’s book Statistical Analysis of Network Data (Springer, 2009).

220 pages, Paperback

First published June 27, 2014

Reviews

[Terran M · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a perfectly servicable book for practitioners giving an overview of network analysis techniques and R implementations. It's a short book, and a bit shallower than one might prefer - it's on the "less theory" side even relative to a book like Introduction to Statistical Learning. However, if you just need to bang out some analysis next week, or do some toy problems to decide if you're interested in this area at all, this book has what you need.

I just now noticed that the same author has written another, distinct book, with a nearly-identical looking cover and title! I believe that one is intended to have more of the theory, but I haven't read it yet.

[Geoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Techniques and examples are nicely illustrated with R code. Does a great job of balancing descriptive and statistical techniques, but bould have used a little more detail on the ststistical techniques. And this isn't the fault of the book, but there was a lot if "formal proffs and/or standards for these techniques haven't been developed yet." I have a feeling that in 10 years the updated version of this book will be great.