Network Analysis
(An English-language class)
This course is over.
Announcement
Instead of the lecture, David Schoch is giving a talk on "Network Centrality Based on Representational Theory of Measurements" on Wednesday, July 23, at 17:00 in P 1138.
Lectures and Tutorials (6 SWS/9 ECTS)
Networks have become omnipresent. Besides physical networks as, e.g., in electrical engineering or transportation systems, abstract networks such as the structure of the WWW or constellations of political actors are increasingly analysed. Due to the variety of applications and resulting research questions, a wide range of methods is applied leading to interesting coherences between graph theory, linear algebra and probabilistic methods. In this course, some of the used methods and their theoretical foundations are presented. While research questions will be motivated by examples of application, the focus, however, will be on algorithmic approaches to these problems as well as their assumptions and characteristics. Moreover, we will come across a number of open questions that invite to further work on this topic.
Times
| Lectures: | Tuesday, 17:00-18:30, D 436 (U. Brandes, S. Kosub) |
| Wednesday, 17:00-18:30, D 436 (U. Brandes, S. Kosub) | |
| Tutorials: | Monday, 17:00-18:30, E 403 (Habiba, D. Schoch) |
| Oral exam: | July 31, 2014 (1st date) |
| October 16, 2014 (2nd date) |
Homework Assignments
Normally, the assignments are made available on this webpage as a PDF-file (in English) every Thursday at 11:00.
The editing time for each homework is one week. It is due on the next Thursday at 11:00. The assignments have to be delivered in written form in English and have to be submitted electronically to the corresponding teaching assistants (as one PDF only). Please follow the naming schema uXX_name1_name2.pdf, where XX indicates the number of the assignment. We will return the corrected and scored assignments in the tutorial. Whatever is not picked up can be retrieved from the corresponding teaching assistant (Habiba PZ1012, David PZ1011).
The requirements for the admittance to the final exam are 50 percent of the total score of the assignments, regular attendance at the tutorials, and the presentation of at least two of your solutions of the assignments. In writing up your assignments, be as clear, precise, and concise as possible. Understandability will be an important factor in the scoring of the assignments. There will be approximately twelve written assignments. Regular attendance is considered especially for borderline cases.
You are permitted and encouraged to work in groups of two.
- Assignment 1 - Post date: 04/24/14 - Due date:05/01/14 (PDF, 105 KB)
- Assignment 2 - Post date: 05/01/14 - Due date: 05/08/14 (PDF, 110 KB)
- Assignment 3 - Post date: 05/08/14 - Due date: 05/15/14 (PDF, 127 KB)
- Assignment 4 - Post date: 05/15/14 - Due date: 05/22/14 (PDF, 159 KB)
- Assignment 5 - Post date: 05/22/14 - Due date: 05/29/14 (PDF, 95 KB)
- Assignment 6 - Post date: 05/29/14 - Due date: 06/05/14 (PDF, 112 KB)
- Assignment 7 - Post date: 06/05/14 - Due date: 06/12/14 (PDF, 142 KB)
- Assignment 8 - Post date: 06/12/14 - Due date: 06/19/14 (PDF, 114 KB)
- Assignment 9 - Post date: 06/19/14 - Due date: 06/26/14 (PDF, 112 KB)
- Assignment 10 - Post date: 06/27/14 - Due date: 07/03/14 (PDF, 118 KB)
- Assignment 11 - Post date: 07/03/14 - Due date: 07/10/14 (PDF, 153 KB)
- Assignment 12 - Post date: 07/10/14 - Due date: 07/17/14 (PDF, 108 KB)
Course Notes and Supplemental Material
Lecture notes of the previous edition of this course (in German). Note that the content is revised again this year:
Lecture notes for this edition (locally accessible only). We attempt to provide updates in a timely manner:
The friendship paradox:
- Scott L. Feld: Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You Do. American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 98(6):1464-1477, 1991.
- Satoshi Kanazawa: Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You Do - And why your girlfriend is a whore. Psychology Today, ‘The Scietific Fundamentalist’ blog entry (1 Nov 2009).
- Nicholas A. Christakis, James H. Fowler: Social Network Sensors for Early Detection of Contagious Outbreaks. PLoS ONE 5(9):e12948, 2010.
- Keith N. Hampton, Lauren Sessions Goulet, Cameron Marlow, Lee Rainie: Why most Facebook users get more than they give. Pew Internet Report (Feb 3, 2012).
- Ezra W. Zuckerman, John T. Jost: What Makes You Think You're so Popular? Self-Evaluation Maintenance and the Subjective Side of the “Friendship Paradox”. Social Psychology Quarterly 64(3):207-223, 2001.
Textbooks
- Ulrik Brandes, Thomas Erlebach (eds.): Network Analysis - Methodological Foundations. Lecture Notes in Computer Science #3418, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2005.
- Reinhard Diestel: Graph Theory. 4th edition, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2010.
- Eric D. Kolaczyk: Statistical Analysis of Network Data. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2009.
- Angelika Steger: Diskrete Strukturen 1 - Kombinatorik, Graphentheorie, Algebra. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2001.
- Stanley Wasserman, Katherine Faust: Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995.