What is a Network?

This chapter introduces the basics of graph theory and its applications in network science. Network science is not a commonly taught area of data science, but many problems can be framed through a network science perspective. Network-based algorithms often scale better than other machine learning algorithms, making them ideal for analyzing datasets with many variables, exploring spatial datasets with many locations represented, or spotting trends in high-dimensional time series data. Later chapters will delve more deeply into the topics with hands-on examples.

In this chapter, we will define terms that will be used throughout the book, explore some common uses of network science in analyzing social relationship data, and introduce two Python packages that will be used in subsequent chapters. After finishing this chapter, you’ll start to recognize data science problems that can be formulated as network science problems and how to represent them visually...