Interpreting graph statistics

Now that we have discussed all of the measures available in Gephi and provided a brief overview of what they can do, the time has come to understand what the raw numbers signify. Each of these measures provides statistical output that needs to be interpreted in order to understand each and every network and to be able to make accurate comparisons between networks.

Fortunately, many of these measures provide normalized output, that is, values that reside on a zero to one continuum, facilitating easy comparisons between different networks. We'll spend a little time on the interpretation basics before moving on to the actual application of many of these statistics to our working network.

Interpreting network measures

When we are examining the various network statistics in Gephi, our goal is to understand the general structure of the network. There are a few simple questions we need to answer using these functions:

• How large is our network, measured by how many steps...