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

Some of the most interesting structure in networks takes place not at the smallest or largest scales, but in-between. Groups of nodes and interrelations between those groups can reveal underlying affiliations, hint at functional similarities between nodes, and identify channels likely to spread contagions of diseases or ideas.

This chapter demonstrated how to find communities in NetworkX using Clauset-Newman-Moore modularity-based communities, as well as Girvan-Newman betweenness-based communities. The chapter also introduced cliques and k-cores, and showed how to use them to identify densely connected regions of a network. Communities, cliques, and k-cores provide the basic tools necessary to analyze the medium-scale structure of networks. The next chapter focuses specifically on social networks and their unique properties.

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