Social Set Analysis: Four Demonstrative Case Studies

This paper argues that the basic premise of Social Network Analysis (SNA) -- namely that social reality is constituted by dyadic relations and that social interactions are determined by structural properties of networks-- is neither necessary nor sufficient, for Big Social Data analytics of Facebook or Twitter data. However, there exist no other holistic computational social science approach beyond the relational sociology and graph theory of SNA. To address this limitation, this paper presents an alternative holistic approach to Big Social Data analytics called Social Set Analysis (SSA). Based on the sociology of associations and the mathematics of classical, fuzzy and rough set theories, this paper proposes a research program. The function of which is to design, develop and evaluate social set analytics in terms of fundamentally novel formal models, predictive methods and visual analytics tools for Big Social Data. Four demonstrative case studies, employing SSA, covering the range of descriptive, predictive, visual and prescriptive analytics are presented and briefly discussed.