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)

Creating a network with code

So far, you've got some handy network formats in your toolbox. But, if your data is too complex or too messy to easily convert into one of the previous formats, you might have to build your network from scratch, adding edges and nodes one at a time. Luckily, the techniques you learned in Chapter 2, Working with Networks in NetworkX, are all you really need! This section walks through a practical example of building a network programmatically from a real data set.

The example in this section is a word co-occurrence network. These networks are used to understand the relationship between words in a particular set of documents. In a co-occurrence network, nodes represent words and edge weights represent how many documents they appear in together. Here, "document could mean any collection of words: blog post, paragraph, sentence, carefully arranged...