AUTHOR=Emmert-Streib Frank , Dehmer Matthias TITLE=Data-Driven Computational Social Network Science: Predictive and Inferential Models for Web-Enabled Scientific Discoveries JOURNAL=Frontiers in Big Data VOLUME=4 YEAR=2021 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/big-data/articles/10.3389/fdata.2021.591749 DOI=10.3389/fdata.2021.591749 ISSN=2624-909X ABSTRACT=

The ultimate goal of the social sciences is to find a general social theory encompassing all aspects of social and collective phenomena. The traditional approach to this is very stringent by trying to find causal explanations and models. However, this approach has been recently criticized for preventing progress due to neglecting prediction abilities of models that support more problem-oriented approaches. The latter models would be enabled by the surge of big Web-data currently available. Interestingly, this problem cannot be overcome with methods from computational social science (CSS) alone because this field is dominated by simulation-based approaches and descriptive models. In this article, we address this issue and argue that the combination of big social data with social networks is needed for creating prediction models. We will argue that this alliance has the potential for gradually establishing a causal social theory. In order to emphasize the importance of integrating big social data with social networks, we call this approach data-driven computational social network science (DD-CSNS).