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A network of interactions, where the nodes comprise of number of people, and the edges comprise of interaction among the people are termed as social network [1]. The numbers of social networks and the strategies to analyze them are available since the past decades [2]. Statistics, graph theory, and sociology are the basics for the development of the area of social networks and are used in number of fields, such as business, economy, and information science [3, 4]. The analysis of a social network is analogous to the analysis of a graph because of the presence of graph, like topology of the social network. Graph analysis consists of a number of strategies but is not suitable to analyze the social networks [5–7] because of its complex characteristics. A very large-sized social network comprises of millions of edges and nodes, where the node generally possess number of attributes. The complex and large graph of social network cannot be managed using the old graph analysis strategies [8].

Email network, collaboration network, and telephone network are the various types of social networks. However, recent online social networks, like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, have gained increased popularity within a short period with a greater number of users. It was found with a survey that Facebook has crossed more than 500 million users in the year 2010 [8]. Social media acts as a highly recognized platform with rich source of data assisting well in the field of marketing of various brands, responding to changes in marketing, enhancing the brands through promotion, and eventually attaining a large number of customers [9–11]. In particular, the role of social network is very important in the area of healthcare applications. As such, the healthcare sector requires discovering new traditions to control the provider practice and measure the best practices to satisfy and improve the health outcomes. Social network analysis (SNA) concentrates on evaluating the relation among individuals, who are attached by one or more knot of interdependency, like friendship, love, trust, cooperation, or communication. Social network analysis can provide imminent into evaluating and understanding the specialized networks of communication and, hence, developing effective interventions in the network to enhance the performance of the provider and eventually, the outcomes related to health [12]. The diagrammatic representation of SNA is shown in Figure 1.1.

For illustration, let us consider that the application of online social network in analyzing the contagious diseases originated with the biological pathogens, such as influenza, chickenpox, measles, and the sexually spread viruses that transfer from one person to another [13–15].

Figure 1.1 Social network analysis.

Recent studies have observed the prologue of a number of SNA models that try to clarify how opinions develop in a population [16], with the consideration of a number of social theories. These models possess a number of common characteristics with that of the spreading and epidemics. Generally, people are considered as agents with a certain state and attached by a social network. The social links is indicated using a complete graph or with more sensible complex networks. The state of the node is typically identified using the variables, which can either be discrete or continuous, with the probability to select either one or another option [17]. The nature of individuals varies with respect to time, depending on a number of update rules, mainly with the interaction of neighbors.