COMP47270 Computational Network Analysis and Modelling

Academic Year 2023/2024

Many real-world systems can be represented as networks. One example which will motivate the analysis in this module is a social network where the nodes in the network represent individual people in society and links represent a social relationship such as friendship. The techniques we will study can be applied in many other contexts. In technology, interconnected computers can be represented as networks; in biology, interacting proteins can be represented as networks. A network analysis can reveal many interesting properties of these systems. Nowadays, many businesses are seeking to exploit the information in their customer databases in order to target services in a personalised way. There is a lot of interest in developing computational techiques to mine the information in the social networks contained in this data. This is challenging from a computational perspective, as the data-sets of interest tend to be very large. It is also challenging from a modelling perspective, as the structure of real-world networks is highly complex. This module will focus on modern computational techniques to extract information from large-scale networks. The module will have a practial focus, but will be grounded by network models developed in the last decade and a half.

NB. This is a professional module which is part of a professional MSc