Getting Started With The Gephi Network Visualisation App – My Facebook Network, Part V

A comment from one of the Gephi developers to Getting Started With The Gephi Network Visualisation App – My Facebook Network, Part IV, in which I described how to use the Modularity statistic to partition a network in terms of several different similar subnetwork groupings, suggested that a far better way of visualising the groups was to use the Partion parameter… and how right they were…

Running the Modularity statistic over my Facebook netwrok, as captured using Netvizz, and then refreshing the view in the Partition panel allows us to colour the netwrok using different partitions – such as the Modularity classes that the Modularity statistic generates and assigns nodes to:

Here’s what happens when we applying the colouring:

Selecting the Group view collects all the nodes in a partition together as a group:

These grouped nodes can be individually ungrouped by right-clicking on a group node and ungrouping it, or they can be expanded which maintains the group identity whilst still letting us look at the local structure:

Here’s what the expanded view of one of the classes looks like, with text labels turned on:

We see that the members of the group are visible, allowing us to explore the make-up of the subnetwork. As you might expect, we can then colour or resize nodes within the expanded group in the normal way:

To create a workspace containing just the members of a particular partition, ungroup all the nodes via the Partition module and filter on the required partition using a Modularity Class filter:

The Partition module is incredibly powerful, as you can hopefully see; but it isn’t limited to dealing with just partitions created using Gephi statistics – it can also deal with partitions defined over the graph as loaded into Gephi (see the GUESS format for more details on how to structure the input file).

So for example, the most recent version of Netvizz will return additional data alongside just the identities of your friends, such as their gender (if revealed to you by their profile privacy settings) and the number of their wall posts. Loading this richer network specification into Gephi, and refreshing the Partion module settings reveals the following:

Which in turn means we can colour the graph as follows:

The wall count parameter is made available through the Ranking panel:

So as we can see, if you have partition data available for network members, Gephi can provide a great way of visualising it :-)