Interdependencies and Social Processes: Dependence Graphs and Generalized Dependence Structures

Abstract

In this chapter, we discuss the importance of the concept of dependence in social network data. Dependence is usually treated as a technical statistical issue, but in the case of social networks, the type of dependencies that might be expected in the data reflect underlying social processes that generate network structures. Consequently, we argue that possible dependencies need to be thought about explicitly when modeling social networks. We present a hierarchy of increasingly more complex dependence assumptions and show how to represent these in terms of dependence graphs. We show how dependence graphs are used in exponential random graph (p*) models for social networks. The most commonly u..