Bayesian computational algorithms for social network analysis

Interest in statistical network analysis has grown massively in recent decades and its perspective and methods are now widely used in many scientific areas that involve the study of various types of networks for representing structure in many complex relational systems such as social relationships, information flows, and protein interactions.Social network analysis is based on the study of social relations between actors so as to understand the formation of social structures by the analysis of basic local relations. Statistical models have started to play an increasingly important role because they give the possibility to explain the complexity of social behaviour and to investigate issues on how the global features of an observed network may be related to local network structures.In this chapter, we review some of the most recent computational advances in the rapidly expanding field of statistical social network analysis using the R open-source software.