Comparative study of different methods of social network analysis and visualization

Abstract

A Social Network is a social structure made of individuals or organizations that are linked by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friends, kinship, terrorist relation, conflict, financial exchange, disease transmission (epidemiology), airline routes etc. Social Network Analysis is an approach to the study of human or organization social interactions. It can be used to investigate kinship patterns, community structure or the organization of other formal and informal social networks. Recently, email networks have been popular source of data for both analysis and visualization of social network of a person or organization. In this paper, three types of visualization technique to analyze social networks have been considered - Force directed layout, Spherical layout and Clustered layout. Each method was evaluated with various data sets from an organization. Force directed layout is used to view the total network structure (Overview). Spherical layout is a 3D method to reveal communication patterns and relationships between different groups. Clustered graph layout visualizes a large amount of data in an efficient and compact form. It gives a hierarchical view of the network. Among the three methods, Clustered layout is the best to handle large network and group relationship. Finally, the comparative study of these three methods has been given.