4.1. Introduction¶
The next three chapters are about systems made up of components and connections between components. For example, in a social network, the components are people and connections represent friendships, business relationships, etc. In an ecological food web, the components are species and the connections represent predator-prey relationships.
In this chapter, we introduce NetworkX, a Python package for building models of these systems. We start with the Erdős-Rényi model, which has interesting mathematical properties. In the next chapter we move on to models that are more useful for explaining real-world systems.
The code for this chapter is in chap04.ipynb in the repository for this book. More information about working with the code is in Section 1.5 as well as in the two appendices.