A social network is defined as a social structure of individuals, who are related (directly or indirectly to each
other) based on a common relation of interest, e.g. friendship, trust, etc. Social network analysis is the study
of social networks to understand their structure and behavior. Social network analysis has gained prominence
due to its use in different applications - from product marketing (e.g. viral marketing) to search engines and
organizational dynamics (e.g. management). Recently there has been a rapid increase in interest regarding
social network analysis in the data mining community. The basic motivation is the demand to exploit
knowledge from copious amounts of data collected, pertaining to social behavior of users in online
environments. A prime example of this are the research efforts dedicated towards the Enron email dataset.
Data mining based techniques are proving to be useful for analysis of social network data, especially for large
datasets that cannot be handled by traditional methods.