Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 9
Relationships
Connections are what define a graph. Without links, nodes are just a table
of data. While most of this topic has discussed links as only one or two links
between nodes, oftentimes there are multiple links. For many objectives,
these multiple links may be aggregated into a singular link. However, for
some types of analyses and applications, you want to keep those many links
and then have approaches to view, filter, and separate different subsets of the
graph based on these links. Applications where it is important to find and
identify afewanomalies inthedata(suchasfrauddetectionorcybersecurity)
are examples where it is important to retain the individual links.
Links and Relationships
At very simple level, you have undirected links. You can perform a lot of
graph analysis at this level, and most of the examples in the topic up to
this point utilize undirected links. You have also seen a few examples with
directed links.
But in the real world, relationships can be much more complex than simple
directed and undirected links. For example, let's say that you are a user
of LinkedIn. You can query a particular person, and if you are directly
connected,therelationshipisimmediatelyshown.LinkedInwillalsoshowall
thetypesofconnectionsbetweenyouandtheotherperson(forexample,field
of study, skills and expertise, location, school, group, and so on).
Figure 9-1
shows the many links between the two authors of this topic.
