Summary

In this chapter, we took raw data, performed a series of steps to clean the network, and even carried out a very simple attack simulation.

I hope that at this point, looking at and working with networks is starting to feel more natural. The more that I work with networks, the more that I see them in everything, and they affect my understanding of the world. We are using a fantasy story for this chapter because it is of a manageable size to explain the construction, cleaning, and some simple analysis. As you learn more about networks, you will likely find that real-world networks are usually much messier, more complicated, and larger. I hope that this simple network will give you the tools and practice you need to eventually chase much more ambitious problems.

In the next chapter, we’re going to have a lot of fun. Our next chapter is about analyzing whole networks. You will learn all kinds of useful things, such as how to identify the most influential nodes in a...