Faculty Sponsor

Jon Beagley

College

Christ College

Discipline(s)

Statistics

Presentation Type

Oral Presentation

Symposium Date

Spring 4-29-2021

Abstract

Networks provide a model of relationships between objects, which can represent numerous invisible services for humans every day. These range from connecting users on social media to controlling how power is distributed throughout a city. We are interested in extending the notion of centrality (mean, median, etc.) to a network. Multiple centrality measurements are introduced, including degree, closeness, betweenness, and eigenvector. Outlier nodes are useful for observing a network's structure. In a university Facebook network, for example, a user with a low centrality measurement may be disconnected from campus, a cause of concern for university faculty. This is a low outlier. On the other hand, users with a high centrality measurement will be influential and thus useful for spreading information to the greater student population. This is a high outlier. The nodes in the network data researched for this presentation have had their centrality measurements analyzed using the interquartile range (IQR) to determine if the node is an outlier.

Biographical Information about Author(s)

Hi, I'm Michael Hamalis. I am a Statistics major at Valparaiso University and I discovered Prof. Jon Beagley's work out of a desire to find an opportunity at participating in statistics research. As I look at various fields to apply statistics in after graduation, it made sense to experience statistics programming outside of a classroom.

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