Latent Space Approaches to Social Network Analysis

Network models are widely used to represent relational information among interacting units. In studies of social networks, recent emphasis has been placed on random graph models where the nodes usually represent individual social actors and the edges represent the presence of a specified relation between actors. We develop a class of models where the probability of a relation between actors depends on the positions of individuals in an unobserved “social space.” We make inference for the social space within maximum likelihood and Bayesian frameworks, and propose Markov chain Monte Carlo procedures for making inference on latent positions and the effects of observed covariates. We present analyses of three…