Summary

This chapter has described many different techniques for quantifying the large-scale structure of networks. Network size can be quantified using the diameter or mean shortest path. Global clustering can be used to quantify how likely a node's neighbors are to be neighbors with each other. Connectivity measures, such as the minimum or average node/edge connectivity, are calculated by finding minimum cuts, and quantify network resilience. The chapter concluded by showing how inequality measures such as entropy and the Gini index can be used to turn small-scale centrality measures into large-scale measures of network centralization. The next chapter discusses medium-scale network structures and community detection.