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	Latent Space Network Model	Homophily Analysis
Field	Sociology	Sociology
Family	Machine learning	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2002	1954 (concept); 2001 (synthesis)
Originator	Peter Hoff, Adrian Raftery & Mark Handcock	Lazarsfeld & Merton (concept); McPherson, Smith-Lovin & Cook (synthesis)
Type	Latent-variable model placing actors in an unobserved social space	Measurement of similarity-based tie formation
Seminal source	Hoff, P. D., Raftery, A. E., & Handcock, M. S. (2002). Latent space approaches to social network analysis. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 97(460), 1090–1098.	McPherson, M., Smith-Lovin, L., & Cook, J. M. (2001). Birds of a feather: homophily in social networks. Annual Review of Sociology, 27, 415–444.
Aliases	latent space model, latent position model, LSM, latent distance model	homophily measurement, assortative mixing analysis, birds-of-a-feather analysis, tie-similarity analysis
Related	4	4
Summary	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.	Homophily analysis quantifies the tendency of similar individuals to form ties — the principle that 'birds of a feather flock together'. It compares the rate at which people connect with others who share an attribute (race, gender, age, education, attitudes) against what would be expected by chance, distinguishing the homophily that arises merely from group sizes from the genuine, behavior-driven preference for similar others.