ANR-Lab Seminar “Comparison of blockmodeling approaches for directed and undirected dynamic networks”
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On Monday, June 6, at 18:00, a scientific seminar of the International Laboratory for Applied Network Research will be held, where Marjan Cugmas, Assistant Professor at the Centre for Methodology and Informatics (University of Ljubljana), will share the result of a study carried out jointly with Aleš Žiberna.
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The term blockmodeling covers a variety of statistical methods used for analysing networks. Specifically, blockmodeling aims to reduce and simplify large and complex networks into smaller and more interpretable structures. This is achieved by shrinking the equivalent nodes (according to their links) from the studied network. So simplified network is called a blockmodel, where nodes represent groups and links between the nodes represent the relationships among the groups.
In the last decade, researchers proposed several approaches for analysing networks observed on the same set of units at several points in time (so-called dynamic networks). Although the proposed approaches are used for the same purpose, they differ in some fundamental characteristics (e.g., whether they are stochastics or deterministic and how they consider time dependency). Moreover, since these approaches are relatively new, they were not yet extensively compared and evaluated.
Therefore, at the seminar, we will look at the study results that aimed to compare and evaluate different blockmodeling approaches using Monte Carlo simulations. We will check how different blockmodeling approaches are affected by different network characteristics, such as size, block density, stability of partitions, local network mechanisms, change of a blockmodel type, and also which blockmodeling approaches generally produce the best results and in what circumstances. In the first part of the presentation, we will focus on directed networks, while in the second part of the presentation, we will present preliminary results on considering co-authorship-like networks, i.e., undirected networks with newcomer and departure nodes.
The language of the seminar is English. The seminar will be held online on the Zoom platform. Registered participants will receive an invitation letter to the video conference.
Registration for the seminar is available here.
We will be glad to see everyone!