Hints and tips:
  • You may need to look up some unfamiliar terms in the title or description to get more of a sense of what is involved.
  • If the project has "No" in the "Current Availability:" field, it is already taken or not being offered this academic year but may be available again in future years.
  • The supervisor name links to a contact details webpage so, if you are interested, you can arrange to discuss this project or even propose a related topic of your own.
Level: BSc, MSci, MSc
Title: Social network analysis of Facebook friends
Supervisor:

Dr Silvia Liverani

Research Area: Probability and Applications [Including Statistics]
Description:

In this project, the student will retrieve data about their Facebook usage and connections over time (using the R package RFacebook). They will visualise the social network of their friendships from the data and discover statistical methods to summarise the information about the network and to investigate whether certain covariates, such as age, can explain certain features of the network.

See [1] for ways of visualising and summarising a network and [2] for an introduction to some ideas of random graphs and real world networks.

A requirement for this project is the successful download of data from the Facebook API, which must be completed before starting the project.

  1. G. Csárdi, Practical statistical network analysis (with R and igraph), http://statmath.wu.ac.at/research/friday/resources_WS0708_SS08/igraph.pdf.
  2. M. E. J. Newman, Random graphs as models of networks, in Handbook of Graphs and Networks: From the Genome to the Internet, Edited by S. Bornholdt and H. G. Schuster, Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim, 2002. 35–68 [http://www.santafe.edu/media/workingpapers/02-02-005.pdf].
Further Reading:
Key Modules:

MTH5120 Statistical Modelling

MTH6134 Statistical Modelling II

MTH5122 Statistical Methods

MTH6136 Statistical Theory

MTH6909/MTH709U/MTHM042/MTH776P Bayesian Statistics

MTH6931/MTH731U/MTHM731 Computational Statistics.

(have passed or be currently attending at least two of the above modules)
Other Information:

Programming skills are a prerequisite for this project, as well as willingness to learn to use the statistical software R. Prior knowledge of R is not a prerequisite.

Current Availability: Yes