Social Network Analysis: A Survey on Measure, Structure, Language Information Analysis, Privacy, and Applications

Abstract

The rapid growth in popularity of online social networks provides new opportunities in computer science, sociology, math, information studies, biology, business, and more. Social network analysis (SNA) is a paramount technique supporting understanding social relationships and networks. Accordingly, certain studies and reviews have been presented focusing on information dissemination, influence analysis, link prediction, and more. However, the ultimate aim is for social network background knowledge and analysis to solve real-world social network problems. SNA still has several research challenges in this context, including users’ privacy in online social networks. Inspired by these facts, we have presented a survey on social network analysis techniques, visualization, structure, privacy, and applications. This detailed study has started with the basics of network representation, structure, and measures. Our primary focus is on SNA applications with state-of-the-art techniques. We further provide a comparative analysis of recent developments on SNA problems in the sequel. The privacy preservation with SNA is also surveyed. In the end, research challenges and future directions are discussed to suggest to researchers a starting point for their research.