Social Network Analysis in Telecommunications

CHAPTER 11

Overview of the Link Analysis Node

Part I of this book covered the theoretical foundation of social network analysis. Part II presented a case study in which most of this foundation was applied. Part III aims to describe how SAS^® addresses this theory, including macros, procedures, and graphical tools used to deliver network analysis capabilities.

Part III starts by presenting the basic statistical capabilities provided by SAS. These procedures are used to prepare input datasets in order to compute the relevant network measures. Further analysis of the network measures can be performed by using the basic statistical procedures presented in Chapter 10. In summary, Chapter 10 presented the tools needed to prepare the input dataset for calculation of social network measures and the tools to analyze the outcomes of the network measures.

This chapter covers the main goal of this book in terms of the capability to perform social network analysis. SAS provides the link analysis node inside SAS^® Enterprise Miner^TM, which contains the link analysis macros used in the case study presented in this book, such as %_rawnodes, %_rawlinks, %_rawmerge, %_rawstats, %_centrality, %_prefix and %_final.

This chapter is important in terms of practical tasks, describing SAS features in relation to social network analysis. These features allow analysts and data miners to study large amounts of data associated with telecommunications networks.

The case study presented in Part II used most of ...