Application of Social Network Analysis to the Investigation of Interpersonal Connections

Abstract

Social network analysis (SNA) is an important and valuable tool for knowledge extraction from massive and unstructured data. Social network provides a powerful abstraction of the structure and dynamics of diverse kinds of interpersonal connection and interaction. In this paper, we address issues associated with the application of SNA to the investigation and analysis of social relationships of people. We provide a brief introduction to representation and analysis of social networks, SNA models and methods. The main objective is to investigate the application of SNA techniques to data mining in case of two social networks Facebook and Twitter. The presented simulations illustrate how social analysis can be used to determine the interpersonal connections, importance of actors in a given social network and detect communities of people. We then discuss strength and weakness of SNA techniques.