CHAPTER 10
Basic Statistics
The description of the basics statistics in this chapter is based on SAS® documentation.1 A very small subset of the statistical procedures available in SAS was used in the development process in relation to the case study presented in this book. For this reason, these statistical procedures are going to be briefly described in this chapter.
The social network analysis approach used in the case study is an exploratory and investigative analysis to understand a social structure’s behavior. This approach aims to create a commonsense understanding about the social network structure and, therefore, about node behavior and the relationships within the social structure. The outcome from the social network approach is a set of network measures that describe the importance of the nodes and links within the social structure.
The statistical procedures presented in this chapter usually take place before and after the social network analysis method. Before the network measures computing, it is always necessary to prepare the data, analyze it, modify it, sometimes insert missing information into the input dataset, and, mostly, transform the traditional data into network data for the social network analysis computing process. The statistical procedures are used in order to analyze the network-measure outcome, identifying the most important nodes, the most relevant links, the network distribution, the outliers, the social structure, the communities, and connected ...
