Multiplex modeling of society

The chapter “Multiplex Modeling of Society” discusses aspects of multiplexity in modeling society. Networks of social interactions are paradigmatic examples of multiplexity. It was recognized long ago by social scientists that the best way to interpret the network of different kinds of human relationships is a multiplex network, where each layer corresponds to a particular type of relationship, for example, between kin, friends, or co-workers. Until recently, only small social networks could be studied, due to the limited size of the datasets collected by traditional methods used in sociology. However, over the past 15 years, this situation has changed substantially due to the large scale of human sociality-related datasets becoming increasingly available. This chapter sums up the “stylized facts” obtained from Big Data, shows how Granovetterian structure can be modeled in a multiplex setup, and discusses modeling channel selection to analyze the sampling bias introduced by single-channel data.