Network Analytics explored in Science

UCL Computer Science's Nataša Pržulj, Professor of Biomedical Data Science, with Research Fellow Noël Malod-Dognin, have had a perspective paper published at Science, 'Network analytics in the age of big data'. See more at http://science.sciencemag.org/content/353/6295/123
We live in a complex world of inter-connected entities. In all areas of human endeavor, from biology to medicine, economics, and climate science, we are flooded with large-scale data sets. They describe intricate real-world systems from different and complementary viewpoints, with entities being modeled as nodes and their connections as edges, comprising large net-works. This is a new and rich source of domain-specific information, but that information is currently largely hidden within the complicated wiring patterns.

Deciphering them is paramount, because computational analyses of large networks are often intractable, so that many of the questions we ask about the world cannot be answered exactly, even with unlimited computer power and time. Hence, the only hope is to answer them approximately (that is, heuristically) and prove how far the approximate answer is from the exact, unknown one, in the worst case.