Networks and society

Abstract

Interconnectedness plays a key role in many social domains and processes. Consider, for example, (i) the underlying social drivers of human behaviour, studied by psychology and sociology; (ii) how financial risks or infectious diseases propagate through a contagion process on a network; and (iii) how migrations of people have shaped society over the course of the last 100,000 years, involving diverse fields such as history and genetics. This special issue offers a broad view of the latest stat- istical approaches in the field of network science and how these allow us to extract and exploit the information from data in the form of networks to answer important societal questions.