Chapter 7 - Extracting networks from data — the “upstream task”

Summary

While there are cases where it is straightforward and unambiguous to define a network given data, often a researcher must make choices in how they define the network and that those choices, preceding most of the work on analyzing the network, have outsized consequences for that subsequent analysis. Sitting between gathering the data and studying the network is the upstream task: how to define the network from the underlying or original data. Defining the network precedes all subsequent or downstream tasks, tasks we will focus on in later chapters. Often those tasks are the focus of network scientists who take the network as a given and focus their efforts on methods using those data. Envision the upstream task by asking, what are the nodes? and what are the links?, with the network following from those definitions. You will find these questions a useful guiding star as you work, and you can learn new insights by reevaluating their answers from time to time.