I have been working with networks now for a long time (maybe since 2008?), and after many projects and thousands of hours spent on studying and working with networks, I’ve recently started looking into subjects that make use of graph theory in an attempt to take what I know about graph theory and see if I can build some complementary skills in other areas. So when I started taking a Bayesian Networks (Graphical Probability) course, I was pleasantly surprised at how interesting and how much can be transferred over in terms of basic concepts.

The truth is however, the term networks in Bayesian [...]

Following up on our poll-driven modeling election series, and my previous prediction that in this election cycle the poll-model system that seems to be in place will fail, it behooves us to at least consider what kind of modeling system we would replace the current system with. I should tell you upfront that I don’t have a final answer yet, but I am playing with some code. This is just a think out loud kind of situation.

I did mention that an agent-based model would be the most likely contender to replace a micro-simulation in my last piece. The advantage would be that you can instantiate an entire population of voters and give each agent in that population his/her own [...]

If you’ve been in the data or computational science field as a researcher or a professional in the last few years, you’ve probably come across someone talking about machine learning. You’ve probably come across an employer or a potential collaborator who was so excited about the potential of “machine learning” that they somehow managed to spit on you in their (pleasantly) ignorant but very cute excitement about the subject. (For those with a spitting problem, you should check out this piece about chronic spitting problems from 2005).

Of course, where hype and ignorance goes so does a fringe academic industry in hopes of capitalizing misunderstood [...]

Recently, I’ve been having conversations about the teaching, or lack of a social network analysis course in business schools both in the graduate and undergraduate levels. I really don’t think enough is being done or that there is an active effort to bring about this powerful science to the hands of future business executives, managers, and professionals.

First of all a simple search on indeed.com for the keywords social network analysis reveals several thousand jobs available in a variety of areas. It’s true that the job set is very diverse covering everything from intelligence analysis to marketing, and it’s true that most job are not solely focused [...]

In a recent project that I’ve been working on (Twitter SNA focus and I’ll tell you more about this project later), an interesting question came up from the client – “So this group is always retweeting/sharing from this group, so they must know each other and/or be ‘organized’, correct?” Well, not so much and here are some reasons why:

First, we have to get a fundamental understanding of what it means to retweet/reshare/like a message and to keep things simple, we’ll focus on twitter’s social media network.

The traditional view is that you would only retweet messages that you either agree with or support, but that [...]

Developing a truly cohesive team is probably one of the most challenging tasks a typical manager will face throughout her career (hey, sorry but we get a little into advanced statistics in this post. Please bear with it). The challenges in team development are numerous, including things like:

Now a team could be a as small as 2 members or as large as a hundred or so. Teams by definition are project oriented, meaning they come together for a purpose and generally speaking they [...]