Representing relational data as networks

Networks, or graphs, are extremely powerful data representations for relationships between entities that are central to a large number of biological studies. Network analysis can reveal a lot about community structures in ecological studies, reveal potential drug targets in protein-protein interactions, and help us understand the interactions involved in complex metabolic reactions. The underlying data structures that represent networks can be complex. Thankfully, R has got some very powerful packages, in particular, igraph and ggraph, that we can use to access information about our networks and make plots. In this recipe, we'll look at some ways of generating plots for a reasonably sized network.

Getting ready

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