Latent Space Network Model

The latent space network model represents each actor as a point in an unobserved low-dimensional 'social space' and makes the probability of a tie between two actors a decreasing function of the distance between their points. Introduced by Peter Hoff, Adrian Raftery, and Mark Handcock in 2002, it gives social networks a geometric interpretation in which proximity captures unobserved similarity, and it automatically reproduces transitivity and homophily through the geometry.