Many types of data have network-type structures, for example, social media networks, international trade networks, financial networks, terrorist networks. This is different from the classical numeric univariate/multivariate data since the network is characterized by nodes and edges. While modeling a network, what we try to characterize is: whether it is a dense network or a sparse one, how to measure the importance of nodes/players, how to compare two networks, etc. This would be the first part of the lecture.

Moreover, we are interested in the dynamics of a network, particularly in detecting changes in the network. This is a relatively new field, and professor Okhrin has a paper in this direction with coauthors from UCL and Uni Warwick. Thus in the second part of the talk, his work will be discussed.