Network model selection: A review of methods
For students and researchers in network science, this is a systematic review that organizes existing methods but is incremental, as it does not introduce new techniques or results.
This book reviews methods for network model selection, organizing them into four categories based on core principles, and provides a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art, concluding with future directions toward a unified optimal method.
Understanding the processes behind the evolution of complex networks is a key objective in network science. An effective framework for tackling this challenge is network model selection, which involves finding the model from a set of candidates that best explains a given network. This book is a systematic review of methods for this purpose. Each method is outlined in three parts: its core principle (used to organize methods into four categories), other relevant details including my own observations, and software availability. The book provides a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art in network model selection and concludes by exploring future directions. A unified, optimal method could identify the mechanisms that shape real-world networks more precisely than any current approach. This work represents the first step toward developing such an optimal method. It will be a valuable resource for students and researchers in network science.