Larger than individual nodes, but smaller than entire networks, the medium-scale or meso-scale structure of a network characterizes groups of nodes—called communities—and their interrelations. NetworkX provides many tools for analyzing community structure. This chapter uses data from an online social network to demonstrate medium-scale network analysis with NetworkX.
Topics in this chapter include the following:
- Communities: How nodes cluster into densely connected groups
- Community detection: How to identify communities of nodes and partition networks
- Cliques: How to understand networks by finding the most highly-connected components
- K-Cores: How to simplify networks by focusing on the most highly-connected nodes