Book Image

Network Science with Python

By : David Knickerbocker
Book Image

Network Science with Python

By: David Knickerbocker

Overview of this book

Network analysis is often taught with tiny or toy data sets, leaving you with a limited scope of learning and practical usage. Network Science with Python helps you extract relevant data, draw conclusions and build networks using industry-standard – practical data sets. You’ll begin by learning the basics of natural language processing, network science, and social network analysis, then move on to programmatically building and analyzing networks. You’ll get a hands-on understanding of the data source, data extraction, interaction with it, and drawing insights from it. This is a hands-on book with theory grounding, specific technical, and mathematical details for future reference. As you progress, you’ll learn to construct and clean networks, conduct network analysis, egocentric network analysis, community detection, and use network data with machine learning. You’ll also explore network analysis concepts, from basics to an advanced level. By the end of the book, you’ll be able to identify network data and use it to extract unconventional insights to comprehend the complex world around you.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Part 1: Getting Started with Natural Language Processing and Networks
5
Part 2: Graph Construction and Cleanup
9
Part 3: Network Science and Social Network Analysis

Asking questions to tell a story

I approach my work from a storytelling perspective; I let my story dictate the work, not the other way around. For instance, if I am starting a project, I’ll ponder or even write down a series of who, what, where, when, why, and how questions:

  • What data do we have? Is it enough?
  • Where do we get more?
  • How do we get more?
  • What blockers prevent us from getting more?
  • How often will we need more?

But this is a different kind of project. We want to gain deeper insights into a piece of text than we might gather through reading. Even after reading a whole book, most people can’t memorize the relationships that are described in the text, and it would likely be a faulty recollection anyway. But we should have questions such as these:

  • Who is mentioned in the text?
  • Who do they know?
  • Who are their adversaries?
  • What are the themes of this text?
  • What emotions are present?
  • What places are mentioned...