A gentle introduction to network theory and analysis

Network theory is a part of graph theory which is a common subject in computer science. It has nodes and edges with attributes (eg. name of the node or weight of the edge). Nodes correspond to a person, group, company or some object. Edges correspond to a connection between them.

This is a hot topic being used in Electric Network Analysis, Social Network Analysis, Biological Network Analysis, Narrative Network Analysis and many more…

How can we analyze these networks?

There are a lot of methodologies in the literature, but in this article, we will focus on the centrality measures. We are determining values of nodes in the network via centrality measures. Common centrality measures are Degree Centrality, Betweenness Centrality and Closeness Centrality. I used Degree Centrality measure for this project so I will give a mathematical explanation for it. Other ones also can work for this project but I don’t want to bother you with details.

Degree Centrality

Degree centrality is calculated as the ratio of the number of neighbours of a node to all nodes in the graph (except itself).

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