Exploring connected components

The first attempt at understanding the various communities and structures that exist in a network is often to analyze the connected components. As we discussed in w, connected components are structures in networks where all nodes have a connection to another node in the same component.

As we saw previously, connected components can be useful for finding smaller connected components. Those can be thought of as communities as they are detached from the primary component and overall network, but the largest connected component is not typically a single community. It is usually made up of several communities, and it can usually be split into individual communities.

In the Les Miserables network, there is only one connected component. There are no islands or isolates. There is just one single component. That makes sense, as these are the characters from a piece of literature, and it wouldn’t make much sense for characters in a book to just spend...