An Introduction to Link Analysis, Social Network Analysis and Relational Data Mining 

Join the VigLink team for a 1 hour talk by Dr. Andrew Fast on Link Analysis, Social Network Analysis and Relational Data Mining.

Overview

The rise of social media including blogs, microblogs, "folksonomies', forums, and photo sharing has led to unprecedented visibility into the social connections between the users of those systems. Data mining and other data modeling algorithms are a natural choice for those seeking to improve the experience of social media users. These algorithms, however, typically assume that the data are both independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.), assumptions that are both clearly violated in social network data. In this talk, Dr. Fast will highlight three methods for understanding and exploring network data:

1. visualization
2. disruptive modeling
3. predictive modeling

Schedule

Lunch | 12:30pm - 1pm

Presentation | 1pm - 2pm

About Dr. Andrew Fast

Dr. Andrew Fast is the Director of Research at Elder Research Inc. where he leads the development of new tools and algorithms for mining data, text, and networks.  Dr. Fast earned his MS and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst,  specializing in algorithms for causal data mining, and for analyzing complex relational data such as social networks.  Andrew has published on an array of applications including detecting securities fraud using the social network among brokers, understanding the structure and behavior of criminal and violent groups, modeling peer-to-peer music file sharing networks, understanding how collective classification works, and predicting playoff success of NFL head coaches (featured on ESPN.com).  With Dr. John Elder and four others, he just completed the book Practical Text Mining, published by Elsevier in January. 

Elder Research Inc. (www.datamininglab.com) is the nations leading data mining consultancy. ERI was founded in 1995 and has offices in Charlottesville, VA and Washington, D.C.  ERI focuses on federal, commercial, financial, and security application of advanced analytics including stock selection, image recognition, biometrics, process optimization, cross-selling, drug efficacy, credit scoring, risk management, and fraud detection.