From visualizing thousands of social relationships, operationalizing measures that offer us insight into our theories, to characterizing cultural change over the span of centuries, computational methods appear to provide sociology a means to reveal patterns otherwise unknowable. While these methods are persistently critiqued for their inability to generate social theory,...
In this thesis we present methods for estimating network metrics via random walk sampling. More specifically, we generalize the Hansen-Hurwitz estimator and the Horvitz-Thompson estimator to estimate the shortest path length distribution (SPLD), closeness centrality ranking, and clustering coefficients of a network. Those are important metrics to a network, but...