Exploring the Make Group tool

Sometimes, groups within the data are not so obvious to the naked eye. This tends to happen when we analyze social media data, for example. Connections between group members may exist, but we can’t “see” them.

Here is where the Make Group tool comes in – we can use it to discover groups via their members’ transitive associations. For example, let’s look at this tiny dataset:

Figure 6.22: Simple example of related IDs

Here, we can see the following:

• A is related to B
• C is related to D
• E is related to D

The Make Group tool will solve hidden transitive relations for us. In this case, since C is related to D (Record 2), and D is related to E (Record 3), it’ll mark them as part of the same group:

Figure 6.23: The resulting groups

Something important to note is that the Group field’s value (that is, the group’s...