Chapter 8 - Implementation: storing and manipulating network data

Summary

In this chapter, we discuss how to represent network data inside a computer, with some examples of computational tasks and the data structures that enable those computations. When working with network data using code, you have many choices of data structures---but which ones are best for our given goals? Writing your own code to process network data can be valuable, yet existing libraries, which feature extensively-tested and efficiently-engineered functionalities, are worth considering as well. Python and R, both excellent programming languages for data science, come well-equipped with third-party libraries for working with network data, and we describe some examples. We also discuss choosing and using typical file formats for storing network data, as many standard formats exist.