CS7280 OMSCS - Network Science

Overall review

I took network science over the summer since there are no exams, and all quizzes are open book and not proctored. There are a total of 12 quizzes over the summer (over 14 Chapters where some quiz combines both chapters) and 5 projects. For Summer 2023, they take the best 12 quiz and best 4 projects.

The TAs were very helpful in providing us both P1 and P2 scores before drop date, and P3&P4 before the deadline of P5. This allowed students to decide if they were going to attempt P5. Personally I did not attempt P5 (I download the assignment zip file and did not unzip it ).

This course is not particularly hard but the projects can be a little ambiguous with clarifications happening in ed discussion. In certain cases, it resulted in me having to completely reworking certain sections. The projects are also done in Juypter notebook with no test suite provided, so you have no idea how well you are doing until they return you your grade. However having said that, the TAs are pretty generous with their grading.

Time requirements

Personally, each of the projects took me about 15-20 hours. A significant part of it was clarifying on ed discussions. In fact for P3, because I had a work deadline, I decided to wait a week for fellow students to post their questions on ed discussion before attempting it myself. To be fair, this is the first semester where the TAs revamped the assignments with boiler plate functions.

Each chapter took me at most 2 nights to read up as well as attempting the quiz. Most of the quiz answers can be found in the lecture materials, occasionally with some searching using Google.

Lectures & Quizzes

I created a set of notes for easy lookup that can be found here. Each of the chapters is referenced by L[X].

Projects

For the projects, you will mainly be exposed to the networkx library and trying to use various functions of the library to do network analysis. This course is not about implementing the graph algorithms yourself.

• Project 1
  • Short introduction to networkx
  • Analyze the distribution of the network to find popular characters in a tv show.
  • Understand the topological aspects of networks.
  • REcommendation system using network.
• Project 2
  • Friendship paradox!
  • Understanding that network actually follow a powerlaw distribution!
  • Understanding the small-world property of network.
• Project 3
  • Using various centrality measures to quantify and understand a network
  • Community Detection
• Project 4
  • Epidemic / Outbreak modeling!
  • Measuring / predicting / estimating the transmission rate.