networks, networks everywhere!
Eric J. Ma (MIT)
slides are available online
about myself
- doctoral candidate, MIT biological engineering
- self-taught pythonista
- using networks to solve problems in infectious disease ecology, evolution & biochemistry
outline
- what are networks?
- example 1: recommendation systems
- example 2: panama papers
- example 3: influenza ecology & evolution
- example 4: neural networks on networks
what are networks
networks, a.k.a. graphs, are composed of nodes (circles) and edges (lines)
example 1: recommendation systems
if A is connected to B and C, but B and C are not connected, then maybe they should be!
example 1: recommendation systems
if A and B share overlapping interests, then maybe some of B's interests can be recommended to A.
example 2: panama papers
graph databases were used to show how the rich hide their money.
example 3: influenza ecology and evolution
for influenza, gene shuffling probably helps in host switching.
example 4: neural networks on networks
graph convolutions let us do machine learning on graph-structured data.
visualize networks rationally
move away from the hairball!
visualize networks rationally
rational network visualizations prioritize placement of nodes
conclusions
- think relationally
- networks can be used creatively to solve all sorts of problems