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stats-for-networks

Introduction

Networks are becoming evermore prevalent, from social networks to transport networks, and it is becoming increasingly important to develop practical methods to analyse what can be extremely large datasets of this form.

This repo is a collection of notebooks created whilst taking the Oxford graduate course Probability and Statistics for Network Analysis in 2020 (taught by Prof. Gesine Reinert). It covers a few of the topics taught in the course:

  • centrality measures
  • summary statistics of graphs
  • random graph models
  • sampling from networks

Some of the basics

A network or graph (more commonly used in maths) is a set of vertices/nodes $V$ and edges $E={(u,v) | u,v\in V}$. They can have all sorts of other stucture such as

  • vertex weights/labels,
  • edge weights/labels,
  • directed edges (in this case, the edges $(u,v)$ and $(v,u)$ are different),
  • self loops (an edge from a vertex $v$ to itself),
  • multiple edges (i.e. more than one distinct edge between the same two vertices), etc.

For example, a transport network might have vertices representing junctions and edges representing the roads between them. If our aim is to use this network to find the shortest route from $a$ to $b$ then we need to know what distance each edge (road) represents. This is a case where we would use edge weights. If we were interested in the quickest route from $a$ to $b$ then we could instead weight the edges by the time taken to traverse each road.

A graph is simple if it contains no multiple edges and no self loops.

Graphs are often summarised by their adjacency matrix $A$, which has entries $A_{i,j}=1$ if there is an edge from node $v_i$ to node $v_j$ and $A_{i,j}=0$ if there is no such edge. If $n=|V|$ then $A$ is an $n\times n$ matrix. If $G$ is an undirected graph then this matrix is symmetric.

This can be adapted for weighted graphs by replacing any $1$ entry with the edge weight.

Another matrix commonly associated to a graph is the Laplacian $L$, defined as $L=D-A$, where $D$ is the diagonal matrix with $D_{i,i}$ as the degree of the vertex $v_i$ and $D_{i,j}=0$ for $i\neq j$, and $A$ is the adjacency matrix.

The content is based on the lecture notes provided by Prof. Reinert in 2020.