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 described many different techniques for quantifying the large-scale structure of networks. Network size can be quantified using the diameter or mean shortest path. Global clustering can be used to quantify how likely a node's neighbors are to be neighbors with each other. Connectivity measures, such as the minimum or average node/edge connectivity, are calculated by finding minimum cuts, and quantify network resilience. The chapter concluded by showing how inequality measures such as entropy and the Gini index can be used to turn small-scale centrality measures into large-scale measures of network centralization. The next chapter discusses medium-scale network structures and community detection.