We can represent social network data in different formats. We cover two common representations: sparse adjacency matrices and edge lists.
Taking data from the Meetup.com social networking site (from the previous recipe in this chapter—Downloading social network data using public APIs), this recipe shows how you can convert a data frame with membership information into a sparse adjacency matrix and then to an edge list.
In this application, nodes represent users of Meetup.com and an edge connects two nodes if they are members of at least one common group. The number of common groups for a pair of people will represent the weight of the connection.
If you have not yet installed the Matrix
package, you should do so now using the following code:
> install.packages("Matrix")
If you completed the prior recipe Downloading social network data using public APIs and have the meetup_users.Rdata
file, you can use it. Otherwise, you can download that...