Chapter 9 - Incorporating node and edge attributes

Summary

Much of the power of networks lies in their flexibility. Networks can successfully describe many different kinds of complex systems. These descriptions are useful in part because they allow us to organize data associated with the system in meaningful ways. These associated attributes and their connections to the network are often the key drivers behind new insights. For example, in a social network, these may be demographic features, such as the ages and occupations of members of a firm. In a protein interaction network, gene ontology terms may be gathered by biologists studying the human genome. We can gain insight by collecting data on those features and associating them with the network nodes or links. In this chapter, we study ways to associate data with the network elements, the nodes and links. We describe ways to gather and store these attributes, what analysis we can do using them, and the most crucial questions to ask about these attributes and their interplay with our networks.