Finding key players

In the previous recipe, Finding strong ties, we began exploring ego networks and strong ties between individuals in our social network. We started to see that actors with strong ties with other actors created clusters that centered on themselves. This leads to the obvious question: who are the key figures in the graph, and what kind of pull do they have? We'll look at a couple of measures to determine how important a node is or its centrality to try to discover the degree centrality, betweenness centrality, closeness centrality, and eigenvector centrality.

Getting ready

If you completed the previous recipes, you will be ready to start this one.

How to do it...

The following steps will identify key players in this network of comic book characters:

1. To find the top ten nodes in the heroes network, we compute the nodes' degree and sort them:

import operator

>>> degrees = sorted(graph.degree().items(), key=operator.itemgetter(1), reverse=True)

>>> for node in...