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)

The small world problem

In 1967, the social psychologists Jeffrey Travers and Stanley Milgram sent letters to groups of people in Wichita, Kansas, and Omaha, Nebraska. They also chose a single target individual in Massachusetts. Each letter recipient was instructed to forward their letter to an acquaintance who was most likely to know the target individual. Many of the letters reached the target, and the researchers were able to find out how many steps it took. The medium number of hops was six, hence, the common phrase six degrees of separation.

Ring networks

Typically, most of an individual's acquaintances are others who live in the same area. If every individual was only acquainted with others who lived near them,...