ABSTRACT
The book is a perspective on how to better represent, model, and think about complex, heterogeneous data structures that arise in modern applications, and discusses some early attempts at gaining such a new perspective, but surely the future of statistical network analysis lies in a yet-to-be-celebrated breakthrough. The book considers Box's admonition along with other foundational topics at the heart of statistical inference. It deemphasizes technical aspects of network analysis in favor of high-level concepts. The book also discusses the guiding principles of statistical network analysis at a high level. It presents a number of scenarios under which different modeling considerations are appropriate, and motivates these scenarios by real (or realistic) applications for which canonical examples already exist. The relevance of networks will continue to expand to include a wider range of disciplines as human behaviors and complex systems become ever more entangled through the growth of the Internet, social media, and other emergent technologies, such as blockchain.
