I am writing a master's thesis in Computer Science. It's the first document I write, so not much experience.
My supervisor told me to include some previous/related work on the topic I am writing about. In short, it is about computing influence in social networks. I have found about 10 papers which I think are the most relevant ones.
The problem is that, while the topic and goal are the same as mine, the math/algorithms they apply are often way different than mine, and advanced enough that it would take a lot of work to truly understand them. So in other words, I want to somehow argue why my model makes sense and not others, but at the same time my work is not directly based on others.
The question is, can I write about it even though I don't understand it? How well am I supposed to know the previous work I am writing about? Is it enough to have some intuition?
Sorry if this is obvious, but my university do not teach us how to write (I guess one point of having a Master's thesis is to learn these things).
I want to somehow argue why my model makes sense and not others
. It is impossible to do this without first understanding how the other models work. Without that information you cannot make the argument you propose. It's a simple as that....it would take a lot of work to truly understand them
. Yes, postgraduate research requires that you do a lot of work to understand things. That's effecitvely what you have signed up for.