Book Image

Network Science with Python and NetworkX Quick Start Guide

By : Edward L. Platt
Book Image

Network Science with Python and NetworkX Quick Start Guide

By: Edward L. Platt

Overview of this book

NetworkX is a leading free and open source package used for network science with the Python programming language. NetworkX can track properties of individuals and relationships, find communities, analyze resilience, detect key network locations, and perform a wide range of important tasks. With the recent release of version 2, NetworkX has been updated to be more powerful and easy to use. If you’re a data scientist, engineer, or computational social scientist, this book will guide you in using the Python programming language to gain insights into real-world networks. Starting with the fundamentals, you’ll be introduced to the core concepts of network science, along with examples that use real-world data and Python code. This book will introduce you to theoretical concepts such as scale-free and small-world networks, centrality measures, and agent-based modeling. You’ll also be able to look for scale-free networks in real data and visualize a network using circular, directed, and shell layouts. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to choose appropriate network representations, use NetworkX to build and characterize networks, and uncover insights while working with real-world systems.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Summary

This chapter has shown how networks that exist in time or space can be represented, analyzed, and visualized in NetworkX. Such networks have additional constraints imposed by the physical realities of time and space. Spatial networks can be visualized using the actual locations of nodes. Gravity models can be used to compensate for different lengths when comparing edge properties. Networks that change over time can be analyzed by creating snapshots, and can possibly link those snapshots into a layered network. This chapter gave examples of working with temporal and spatial networks using US air traffic data and historical data on Dutch Wikipedia articles. The next chapter will cover some advanced visualization techniques in NetworkX.