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 global structure of networks

When trying to understand the general trends in a network, or exploring the differences between networks, staring at hairballs is not particularly useful (as much as my cat tries to convince me otherwise). Quantitative measures of large-scale network structures make it possible to characterize and compare different networks.

Large-scale structures can help you approach questions including the following:

  • Is a network becoming more or less resilient to failures as it grows?
  • How far does data or electricity need to travel as it moves across a network?
  • How centralized is a network?
  • Do nodes cluster into tightly connected groups?

Datasets

This chapter explores large-scale network structures using...