Statistical Analysis of Single Relational Networks

We now turn our attention to stochastic models for social network data. The methodology described here continues the development of statistical methods for network data begun in Chapter 13. We begin in Chapter 15 by considering a (very special) class of statistical distributions for random directed graphs, which, as we will show, is a special case of the uniform random directed graph distributions presented in Chapter 13. This class is more interesting than the distributions of Chapter 13, and contains substantively meaningful parameters which reflect a wide variety of graph properties. Further, the parameters can actually be estimated from data. The basic model has many generalizations and extensions, some of which are described in Chapter 16