👓 Disconnected, fragmented, or united? a trans-disciplinary review of network science | Applied Network Science | César A. Hidalgo

Read Disconnected, fragmented, or united? a trans-disciplinary review of network science by César A. HidalgoCésar A. Hidalgo (Applied Network Science | SpringerLink)
During decades the study of networks has been divided between the efforts of social scientists and natural scientists, two groups of scholars who often do not see eye to eye. In this review I present an effort to mutually translate the work conducted by scholars from both of these academic fronts hoping to continue to unify what has become a diverging body of literature. I argue that social and natural scientists fail to see eye to eye because they have diverging academic goals. Social scientists focus on explaining how context specific social and economic mechanisms drive the structure of networks and on how networks shape social and economic outcomes. By contrast, natural scientists focus primarily on modeling network characteristics that are independent of context, since their focus is to identify universal characteristics of systems instead of context specific mechanisms. In the following pages I discuss the differences between both of these literatures by summarizing the parallel theories advanced to explain link formation and the applications used by scholars in each field to justify their approach to network science. I conclude by providing an outlook on how these literatures can be further unified.

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

Social scientists focus on explaining how context specific social and economic mechanisms drive the structure of networks and on how networks shape social and economic outcomes. By contrast, natural scientists focus primarily on modeling network characteristics that are independent of context, since their focus is to identify universal characteristics of systems instead of context specific mechanisms.  ❧

August 25, 2018 at 10:18PM

Science and Complexity (Weaver 1948); explained the three eras that according to him defined the history of science. These were the era of simplicity, disorganized complexity, and organized complexity. In the eyes of Weaver what separated these three eras was the development of mathematical tools allowing scholars to describe systems of increasing complexity.  ❧

August 25, 2018 at 10:19PM

Problems of disorganized complexity are problems that can be described using averages and distributions, and that do not depend on the identity of the elements involved in a system, or their precise patterns of interactions. A classic example of a problem of disorganized complexity is the statistical mechanics of Ludwig Boltzmann, James-Clerk Maxwell, and Willard Gibbs, which focuses on the properties of gases.  ❧

August 25, 2018 at 10:20PM

Soon after Weaver’s paper, biologists like Francois Jacob (Jacob and Monod 1961), (Jacob et al. 1963) and Stuart Kaufmann (Kauffman 1969), developed the idea of regulatory networks. Mathematicians like Paul Erdos and Alfred Renyi, advanced graph theory (Erdős and Rényi 1960) while Benoit Mandelbrot worked on Fractals (Mandelbrot and Van Ness 1968), (Mandelbrot 1982). Economists like Thomas Schelling (Schelling 1960) and Wasily Leontief (Leontief 1936), (Leontief 1936), respectively explored self-organization and input-output networks. Sociologists, like Harrison White (Lorrain and White 1971) and Mark Granovetter (Granovetter 1985), explored social networks, while psychologists like Stanley Milgram (Travers and Milgram 1969) explored the now famous small world problem.   ❧

Some excellent references
August 25, 2018 at 10:24PM

First, I will focus in these larger groups because reviews that transcend the boundary between the social and natural sciences are rare, but I believe them to be valuable. One such review is Borgatti et al. (2009), which compares the network science of natural and social sciences arriving at a similar conclusion to the one I arrived.  ❧

August 25, 2018 at 10:27PM

Links are the essence of networks. So I will start this review by comparing the mechanisms used by natural and social scientists to explain link formation.  ❧

August 25, 2018 at 10:32PM

When connecting the people that acted in the same movie, natural scientists do not differentiate between people in leading or supporting roles.  ❧

But they should because it’s not often the case that these are relevant unless they are represented by the same agent or agency.
August 25, 2018 at 10:51PM

For instance, in the study of mobile phone networks, the frequency and length of interactions has often been used as measures of link weight (Onnela et al. 2007), (Hidalgo and Rodriguez-Sickert 1008), (Miritello et al. 2011).  ❧

And they probably shouldn’t because typically different levels of people are making these decisions. Studio brass and producers typically have more to say about the lead roles and don’t care as much about the smaller ones which are overseen by casting directors or sometimes the producers. The only person who has oversight of all of them is the director, and even then they may quit caring at some point.
August 25, 2018 at 10:52PM

Social scientists explain link formation through two families of mechanisms; one that finds it roots in sociology and the other one in economics. The sociological approach assumes that link formation is connected to the characteristics of individuals and their context. Chief examples of the sociological approach include what I will call the big three sociological link-formation hypotheses. These are: shared social foci, triadic closure, and homophily.  ❧

August 25, 2018 at 10:55PM

The social foci hypothesis predicts that links are more likely to form among individuals who, for example, are classmates, co-workers, or go to the same gym (they share a social foci). The triadic closure hypothesis predicts that links are more likely to form among individuals that share “friends” or acquaintances. Finally, the homophily hypothesis predicts that links are more likely to form among individuals who share social characteristics, such as tastes, cultural background, or physical appearance (Lazarsfeld and Merton 1954), (McPherson et al. 2001).  ❧

definitions of social foci, triadic closure, and homophily within network science.
August 26, 2018 at 11:39AM

Yet, strategic games look for equilibrium in the formation and dissolution of ties in the context of the game theory advanced first by (Von Neumann et al. 2007), and later by (Nash 1950).  ❧

August 25, 2018 at 10:58PM

Preferential attachment is the idea that connectivity begets connectivity.  ❧

August 25, 2018 at 10:59PM

Preferential attachment is an idea advanced originally by the statisticians John Willis and Udny Yule in (Willis and Yule 1922), but has been rediscovered numerous times during the twentieth century.  ❧

August 25, 2018 at 11:00PM

Rediscoveries of this idea in the twentieth century include the work of (Simon 1955) (who did cite Yule), (Merton 1968), (Price 1976) (who studied citation networks), and (Barabási and Albert 1999), who published the modern reference for this model, which is now widely known as the Barabasi-Albert model.  ❧

August 25, 2018 at 11:01PM

preferential attachment. In the eyes of the social sciences, however, understanding which of all of these hypotheses drives the formation of the network is what one needs to explore.  ❧

For example what drives attachment of political candidates?
August 26, 2018 at 08:15AM

Finally it is worth noting that trust, through the theory of social capital, has been connected with long-term economic growth—even though these results are based on regressions using extremely sparse datasets.  ❧

And this is an example of how Trump is hurting the economy.
August 26, 2018 at 08:33AM

Nevertheless, the evidence suggests that social capital and social institutions are significant predictors of economic growth, after controlling for the effects of human capital and initial levels of income (Knack and Keefer 1997), (Knack 2002).4 So trust is a relevant dimension of social interactions that has been connected to individual dyads, network formation, labor markets, and even economic growth.  ❧

August 26, 2018 at 08:35AM

Social scientist, on the other hand, have focused on what ties are more likely to bring in new information, which are primarily weak ties (Granovetter 1973), and on why weak ties bring new information (because they bridge structural holes (Burt 2001), (Burt 2005)).  ❧

August 26, 2018 at 09:45AM

heterogeneous networks have been found to be effective promoters of the evolution of cooperation, since there are advantages to being a cooperator when you are a hub, and hubs tend to stabilize networks in equilibriums where levels of cooperation are high (Ohtsuki et al. 2006), (Pacheco et al. 2006), (Lieberman et al. 2005), (Santos and Pacheco 2005).  ❧

August 26, 2018 at 09:49AM

These results, however, have also been challenged by human experiments finding no such effect (Gracia-Lázaro et al. 2012). The study of cooperation in networks has also been performed in dynamic settings, where individuals are allowed to cut ties (Wang et al. 2012), promoting cooperation, and are faced with different levels of knowledge about the reputation of peers in their network (Gallo and Yan 2015). Moreover, cooperating behavior has seen to spread when people change the networks where they participate in (Fowler and Christakis 2010).  ❧

Open questions
August 26, 2018 at 09:50AM

References

1.
Hidalgo CA. Disconnected, fragmented, or united? a trans-disciplinary review of network science. ANS. 2016;1(1). doi:10.1007/s41109-016-0010-3

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Chris Aldrich

I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, IndieWeb, theoretical mathematics, and big history. I'm also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.

13 thoughts on “👓 Disconnected, fragmented, or united? a trans-disciplinary review of network science | Applied Network Science | César A. Hidalgo”

  1. Bookmarked Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness by Mark Granovetter (American Journal of Sociology)

    How behavior and institutions are affected by social relations is one of the classic questions of social theory. This paper concerns the extent to which economic action is embedded in structures of social relations, in modern industrial society. Although the usual neoclasical accounts provide an “undersocialized” or atomized-actor explanation of such action, reformist economists who attempt to bring social structure back in do so in the “oversocialized” way criticized by Dennis Wrong. Under-and oversocialized accounts are paradoxically similar in their neglect of ongoing structures of social relations, and a sophisticated account of economic action must consider its embeddedness in such structures. The argument in illustrated by a critique of Oliver Williamson’s “markets and hierarchies” research program.

    h/t Disconnected, fragmented, or united? a trans-disciplinary review of network science by César A. Hidalgo (Applied Network Science | SpringerLink)

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  2. Bookmarked An Experimental Study of the Small World Problem by Jeffrey Travers and Stanley Milgram (Sociometry | American Sociological Association)

    Arbitrarily selected individuals (N=296) in Nebraska and Boston are asked to generate acquaintance chains to a target person in Massachusetts, employing “the small world method” (Milgram, 1967). Sixty-four chains reach the target person. Within this group the mean number of intermediaries between starters and targets is 5.2. Boston starting chains reach the target person with fewer intermediaries than those starting in Nebraska; subpopulations in the Nebraska group do not differ among themselves. The funneling of chains through sociometric “stars” is noted, with 48 per cent of the chains passing through three persons before reaching the target. Applications of the method to studies of large scale social structure are discussed.

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  3. h/t Disconnected, fragmented, or united? a trans-disciplinary review of network science by César A. Hidalgo (Applied Network Science | SpringerLink)
    Given the large number of “Trust” related books being released this year, most in reference to Donald J. Trump’s administration, this might be an interesting read which takes him out of the equation and potentially better underlines the bigger problem we’re seeing in a growing anti-scientific leaning America?
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  4. Bookmarked Trust: The Social Virtues and The Creation of Prosperity by Francis Fukuyama (Free Press)

    In his bestselling The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama argued that the end of the Cold War would also mean the beginning of a struggle for position in the rapidly emerging order of 21st-century capitalism. In Trust, a penetrating assessment of the emerging global economic order “after History,” he explains the social principles of economic life and tells us what we need to know to win the coming struggle for world dominance.
    Challenging orthodoxies of both the left and right, Fukuyama examines a wide range of national cultures in order to divine the underlying principles that foster social and economic prosperity. Insisting that we cannot divorce economic life from cultural life, he contends that in an era when social capital may be as important as physical capital, only those societies with a high degree of social trust will be able to create the flexible, large-scale business organizations that are needed to compete in the new global economy.
    A brilliant study of the interconnectedness of economic life with cultural life, Trust is also an essential antidote to the increasing drift of American culture into extreme forms of individualism, which, if unchecked, will have dire consequences for the nation’s economic health.

    h/t Disconnected, fragmented, or united? a trans-disciplinary review of network science by César A. Hidalgo (Applied Network Science | SpringerLink)
    Given the large number of “Trust” and “Truth” related books being released this year, most in reference to Donald J. Trump’s administration, this might be an interesting read which takes him out of the equation and potentially better underlines the bigger problem we’re seeing in a growing anti-scientific leaning America?

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  5. Bookmarked Some Statistics of Evolution and Geographical Distribution in Plants and Animals, and their Significance by J. C. Willis and G. Udny Yule (Nature volume 109, pages 177–179)

    Abstract
    IN a paper read at the Linnean Society under the above title on February 2, the statistical methods long employed in “Age and Area” were pushed to their final conclusion. Age and area (review in Ann. of Bot., October, 1921, p. 493) is the name given to a principle gradually discovered in many years of work upon the flora of Ceylon, which, in brief, affirms that if one take groups of not less than ten allied species and compare them with similar groups allied to the first, the relative total areas occupied in a given country, or in the world, will be more or less proportional (whether directly or not we do not yet know) to their relative total ages, within that country or absolutely, as the case may be. The longer a group has existed the more area will it occupy. Tens are compared in order to eliminate chance differences as much as possible, and allied groups to avoid as far as may be the complications introduced by different ecological habit, etc. Herbs, for example, probably spread much more rapidly than trees, but both will obey Age and Area. It is of course obvious that age of itself cannot effect dispersal, but inasmuch as predictions as to distribution of species, occurrence of endemics, etc., can be successfully made upon the basis of age alone, it is clear that the average rate of spreading of a given species, and still more of a group of allied species, is very uniform, and therefore affords a measure of age. The result of the work is to show that in general the species (and genera) of smallest areas are the youngest, and are descended from the more widespread species that usually occur beside them.

    h/t Disconnected, fragmented, or united? a trans-disciplinary review of network science by César A. Hidalgo (Applied Network Science | SpringerLink)

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  6. Bookmarked Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks by Albert-László Barabási, Réka Albert (Science)

    Systems as diverse as genetic networks or the World Wide Web are best described as networks with complex topology. A common property of many large networks is that the vertex connectivities follow a scale-free power-law distribution. This feature was found to be a consequence of two generic mechanisms: (i) networks expand continuously by the addition of new vertices, and (ii) new vertices attach preferentially to sites that are already well connected. A model based on these two ingredients reproduces the observed stationary scale-free distributions, which indicates that the development of large networks is governed by robust self-organizing phenomena that go beyond the particulars of the individual systems.

    h/t Disconnected, fragmented, or united? a trans-disciplinary review of network science by César A. Hidalgo (Applied Network Science | SpringerLink)

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  7. Bookmarked Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks by Albert-László Barabási, Réka Albert (Science)

    Systems as diverse as genetic networks or the World Wide Web are best described as networks with complex topology. A common property of many large networks is that the vertex connectivities follow a scale-free power-law distribution. This feature was found to be a consequence of two generic mechanisms: (i) networks expand continuously by the addition of new vertices, and (ii) new vertices attach preferentially to sites that are already well connected. A model based on these two ingredients reproduces the observed stationary scale-free distributions, which indicates that the development of large networks is governed by robust self-organizing phenomena that go beyond the particulars of the individual systems.

    h/t Disconnected, fragmented, or united? a trans-disciplinary review of network science by César A. Hidalgo (Applied Network Science | SpringerLink)

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  8. Bookmarked Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks by Albert-László Barabási, Réka Albert (Science)

    Systems as diverse as genetic networks or the World Wide Web are best described as networks with complex topology. A common property of many large networks is that the vertex connectivities follow a scale-free power-law distribution. This feature was found to be a consequence of two generic mechanisms: (i) networks expand continuously by the addition of new vertices, and (ii) new vertices attach preferentially to sites that are already well connected. A model based on these two ingredients reproduces the observed stationary scale-free distributions, which indicates that the development of large networks is governed by robust self-organizing phenomena that go beyond the particulars of the individual systems.

    h/t Disconnected, fragmented, or united? a trans-disciplinary review of network science by César A. Hidalgo (Applied Network Science | SpringerLink)

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  9. Bookmarked Statistical mechanics of complex networks by Réka Albert and Albert-László Barabási (Reviews of Modern Physics 74, 47 (2002))

    Complex networks describe a wide range of systems in nature and society. Frequently cited examples include the cell, a network of chemicals linked by chemical reactions, and the Internet, a network of routers and computers connected by physical links. While traditionally these systems have been modeled as random graphs, it is increasingly recognized that the topology and evolution of real networks are governed by robust organizing principles. This article reviews the recent advances in the field of complex networks, focusing on the statistical mechanics of network topology and dynamics. After reviewing the empirical data that motivated the recent interest in networks, the authors discuss the main models and analytical tools, covering random graphs, small-world and scale-free networks, the emerging theory of evolving networks, and the interplay between topology and the network’s robustness against failures and attacks.

    h/t Disconnected, fragmented, or united? a trans-disciplinary review of network science by César A. Hidalgo (Applied Network Science | SpringerLink)

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  10. Bookmarked A Dynamic Network Approach for the Study of Human Phenotypes by César A. Hidalgo , Nicholas Blumm, Albert-László Barabási, Nicholas A. Christakis (PLOS Computational Biology)

    Author Summary: To help the understanding of physiological failures, diseases are defined as specific sets of phenotypes affecting one or several physiological systems. Yet, the complexity of biological systems implies that our working definitions of diseases are careful discretizations of a complex phenotypic space. To reconcile the discrete nature of diseases with the complexity of biological organisms, we need to understand how diseases are connected, as connections between these different discrete categories can be informative about the mechanisms causing physiological failures. Here we introduce the Phenotypic Disease Network (PDN) as a map summarizing phenotypic connections between diseases and show that diseases progress preferentially along the links of this map. Furthermore, we show that this progression is different for patients with different genders and racial backgrounds and that patients affected by diseases that are connected to many other diseases in the PDN tend to die sooner than those affected by less connected diseases. Additionally, we have created a queryable online database (http://hudine.neu.edu/) of the 18 different datasets generated from the more than 31 million patients in this study. The disease associations can be explored online or downloaded in bulk.

    h/t Disconnected, fragmented, or united? a trans-disciplinary review of network science by César A. Hidalgo (Applied Network Science | SpringerLink)

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  11. Bookmarked Network medicine: a network-based approach to human disease by Albert-László Barabási, Natali Gulbahce & Joseph Loscalzo (Nature Reviews Genetics | volume 12, pages 56–68 (2011))

    Abstract
    Given the functional interdependencies between the molecular components in a human cell, a disease is rarely a consequence of an abnormality in a single gene, but reflects the perturbations of the complex intracellular and intercellular network that links tissue and organ systems. The emerging tools of network medicine offer a platform to explore systematically not only the molecular complexity of a particular disease, leading to the identification of disease modules and pathways, but also the molecular relationships among apparently distinct (patho)phenotypes. Advances in this direction are essential for identifying new disease genes, for uncovering the biological significance of disease-associated mutations identified by genome-wide association studies and full-genome sequencing, and for identifying drug targets and biomarkers for complex diseases.

    Key points

    A disease phenotype is rarely a consequence of an abnormality in a single effector gene product, but reflects various pathobiological processes that interact in a complex network.
    Here we present an overview of the organizing principles that govern cellular networks and the implications of these principles for understanding disease. Network-based approaches have potential biological and clinical applications, from the identification of disease genes to better drug targets.
    Whereas essential genes tend to be associated with hubs, or highly connected proteins, disease genes tend to segregate at the network’s functional periphery, avoiding hubs.
    Disease genes have a high propensity to interact with each other, forming disease modules. The identification of these disease modules can help us to identify disease pathways and predict other disease genes.
    The highly interconnected nature of the interactome means that, at the molecular level, it is difficult to consider diseases as being independent of one another. The mapping of network-based dependencies between pathophenotypes has culminated in the concept of the diseasome, which represents disease maps whose nodes are diseases and whose links represent various molecular relationships between the disease-associated cellular components.
    Diseases linked at the molecular level tend to show detectable comorbidity.
    Network medicine has important applications to drug design, leading to the emergence of network pharmacology, and also in disease classification.

    h/t Disconnected, fragmented, or united? a trans-disciplinary review of network science by César A. Hidalgo (Applied Network Science | SpringerLink)

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  12. Bookmarked The Strength of Weak Ties by Mark S. Granovetter (American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (May, 1973): 1360-1380. https://doi.org/10.1086/225469)

    Analysis of social networks is suggested as a tool for linking micro and macro levels of sociological theory. The procedure is illustrated by elaboration of the macro implications of one aspect of small-scale interaction: the strength of dyadic ties. It is argued that the degree of overlap of two individuals’ friendship networks varies directly with the strength of their tie to one another. The impact of this principle on diffusion of influence and information, mobility opportunity, and community organization is explored. Stress is laid on the cohesive power of weak ties. Most network models deal, implicitly, with strong ties, thus confining their applicability to small, well-defined groups. Emphasis on weak ties lends itself to discussion of relations between groups and to analysis of segments of social structure not easily defined in terms of primary groups.

    h/t Disconnected, fragmented, or united? a trans-disciplinary review of network science by César A. Hidalgo (Applied Network Science | SpringerLink)

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  13. Bookmarked The Strength of Weak Ties by Mark S. Granovetter (American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (May, 1973): 1360-1380. https://doi.org/10.1086/225469)

    Analysis of social networks is suggested as a tool for linking micro and macro levels of sociological theory. The procedure is illustrated by elaboration of the macro implications of one aspect of small-scale interaction: the strength of dyadic ties. It is argued that the degree of overlap of two individuals’ friendship networks varies directly with the strength of their tie to one another. The impact of this principle on diffusion of influence and information, mobility opportunity, and community organization is explored. Stress is laid on the cohesive power of weak ties. Most network models deal, implicitly, with strong ties, thus confining their applicability to small, well-defined groups. Emphasis on weak ties lends itself to discussion of relations between groups and to analysis of segments of social structure not easily defined in terms of primary groups.

    h/t Disconnected, fragmented, or united? a trans-disciplinary review of network science by César A. Hidalgo (Applied Network Science | SpringerLink)

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