Facebook (and Systems Biologists) Take Note: Network Analysis
Reveals True Connections New method tackles social networks,
biological systems, air transportation and moreDecember 7, 2009
| by Megan Fellman Roger Guimera and Marta Sales-Pardo, a
husband-wife research team at Northwestern University, have
developed a universal method that can accurately analyze a range
of complex networks -- including social networks, protein-
protein interactions and air transportation networks. Although
the datasets they used were much smaller than Facebook's, the
researchers demonstrated the great potential of their method.
Guimera and Sales-Pardo had wondered if one technique,
exploiting the fact that all networks have groups in them and
those groups are connected in many different ways, could be used
to predict both friendships in a social network and protein-
protein interactions within a cell. They applied their
mathematical and computational framework to five different
networks, ranging from a group of dolphins to a netwo