asymmetrical network analysis definition

The analysis and modeling of networks and also networked dynamical systems have been the subject of considerable interdisciplinary interest covering a wide range of areas from physics, mathematics, computer science, biology, economics and sociology, in the so-called “new” science of networks. Organizations and individuals are increasingly connected through a wide range of online and offline networks at different relational levels: social, professional, interaction, information flow, etc. One of the consequences of today’s information society is the rise of the digital network society. The challenges suggest that significant further research is required in evolving social networks, i.e., existent methods, techniques, and algorithms must be rethought and designed toward incremental and dynamic versions that allow the efficient analysis of evolving networks.

This chapter reviews the state of the art in selected aspects of evolving social networks presenting open research challenges related to OSNs. Due to their temporal dimension, rapid growth of users, velocity of changes in networks, and amount of data that these OSNs generate, effective and efficient methods and techniques for small static networks are now required to scale and deal with the temporal dimension in case of streaming settings. Other problems such as network-level statistics computation, link prediction, community detection, and visualization gain additional research importance when applied to dynamic online social networks (OSNs). They are a natural extension of network science since almost all real-world networks evolve over time, either by adding or by removing nodes or links over time: elementary actor-level network measures like network centrality change as a function of time, popularity and influence of individuals grow or fade depending on processes, and events occur in networks during time intervals.

Evolving networks by definition are networks that change as a function of time.

Asymmetrical network analysis definition