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 several of the visualization methods provided by NetworkX, as well as ways to use them effectively. The circular layout is a clear and simple option for smaller networks. Maintaining much of the clarity of the circular layout, the shell layout can visualize more nodes in the same space and can convey centrality information. Finally, the force-directed layout can handle large networks and communicate community structure, although it is sometimes necessary to apply additional techniques to focus on particular subsets of edges. Our network adventure is now drawing to a close. The next and final chapter reviews the themes of this book, and offers some suggestions for additional resources.