Regensburg 2016 – scientific programme

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 6: Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics (YSA) - Award Ceremony

SOE 6.2: Prize Talk

Monday, March 7, 2016, 17:00–17:45, H36

Community Structure in Social and Financial Networks — •Mason Porter — University of Oxford, UK

Networks consist of entities (represented by nodes) connected to each other via ties (represented by edges). To gain insights into networks, it is often useful to coarse-grain them to explore mesoscale structures. The best-studied type of mesoscale network structure is a "community", which consists of a dense set of nodes that is (hopefully) connected sparsely to other dense sets of nodes. In this talk, I'll discuss a couple of methods for detecting communities in networks --- one based on maximizing a quality function called "modularity" and another based on local perspective --- and I'll discuss applications to social and financial networks. I'll also provide some cautionary notes about studying community structure in networks and briefly discuss some other mesoscale structures (e.g. core--periphery structure) and why they are important for social and financial applications.