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 Graph class – undirected networks

In NetworkX, the Graph class is used to represent undirected networks and analyze their structure. The previous chapter showed how to create a network from scratch by adding nodes and edges. This section will instead use one of the ready-made networks available in NetworkX: Zachary's karate club (Zachary, 1977).

This network represents the friendships (edges) between members (nodes) of a karate club studied between 1970 and 1972. This particular karate club has long been of interest to sociologists and network scientists, because it eventually split into two different clubs after a disagreement between the instructor and the club president (this might explain why there aren't any famous studies of conflict resolution clubs). In the original study, Zachary used the network structure to predict which members would join which...