A social network is defined as a social structure of individuals, who are related (directly or indirectly to each other) based on a common relation of interest, e.g. friendship, trust, etc. Social network analysis is the study of social networks to understand their structure and behavior. Social network analysis has gained prominence due to its use in different applications - from product marketing (e.g. viral marketing) to search engines and organizational dynamics (e.g. management). Recently there has been a rapid increase in interest regarding social network analysis in the data mining community. The basic motivation is the demand to exploit knowledge from copious amounts of data collected, pertaining to social behavior of users in online environments. A prime example of this are the research efforts dedicated towards the Enron email dataset. Data mining based techniques are proving to be useful for analysis of social network data, especially for large datasets that cannot be handl...
J. Srivastava