Social network and formal concept analysis

Abstract

In this contribution we present possible using of Formal Concept Analysis, a special method of relational data analysis, in the Social Network research. Firstly, we recall basic information about the classical Ganter and Wille's version of Formal Concept Analysis, and about our one-sided version of it. Then we give information about our experiment with a social network of students from one school class. Each pupil has characterized his/her relationships to all schoolmates by value from the given range. Then we use one-sided fuzzy Formal Concept Analysis and especially modified Rice-Siff's algorithm to form clusters. In the end we interpret the results, i.e. interesting groups of students which are viewed by their schoolmates in a similar way, as groups of friends. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.