Hypergraphs

Another exciting avenue of research in network science involves hypergraphs, which are an extension of networks in which multi-way relationships can include multiple vertices. In this way, the concept of edges is extended in a similar way to how the concept of edges was extended in Chapter 6, within the Extending network metrics for time series analytics section on simplicial complexes. In fact, the abstraction of simplicial complexes is one type of hypergraph.

Hypergraphs are often useful for visualizing database diagrams and planning information retrieval systems, where many-to-many relationships often exist. Some distributed computing systems even provide hypergraph algorithms to aid in these retrieval tasks at scale.

Visualization via hypergraphs is also used extensively in bioinformatics, where multi-way relationships exist between proteins, biological pathways, gene expression datasets, and metabolic processes. In complex systems, it is often easier to show...