Introduction to Network Science

According to one view, network science may be defined as the study of the collection,management,analysis,interpretation, and presentation of relational information. The rapid diffusion of network science as a discipline is based on two main observations. The first concerns the ubiquity of relational data: gene regulatory networks,supply chains,peer-productions, recommender systems, and social media all produce large quantities of relational information. The second concerns the fact that networks found in these very different contexts have common structural and mathematical features that encourage the development of a general analytical approach The purpose of this class is to introduce participants to some of the fundamental problems raised, and solutions offered by contemporary network science. Examples of topics covered include scale-free networks,random graphs,community detection, and network evolution. Whenever appropriate, theoretical concepts will be illustrated through the analysis of real-life problems

REFERENCES

• Barabási, A. L. (2016). Network Science. Cambridge university press.
• Easley, D., & Kleinberg, J. (2010). Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning about a highly connected world. Cambridge University Press.

*****************************

The course will not be offered in the academic year 2018/19