Network Science in Complex Systems Analysis

Network science is an academic field which studies complex systems comprising of many interacting parts by representing the parts as nodes (or vertices) of a graph and the interactions between them as links (or edges). The analysis of such systems as networks, including computer networks, social networks, and biological networks, has received an enormous amount of interest in the last few years stimulated by the widespread availability of relevant network data and increased computational capabilities of modern computers. The study of networks is broadly interdisciplinary and important developments have occurred in many fields, including mathematics, physics, computer and information sciences, biology, and the social sciences.

In this paper, I examine two real life networks, and a social one, evolving the acquaintances of the main suspects in the 9/11 terrorist attack, and a biological one, representing the human disease network, by introducing and implementing the core concepts of network science. To do so, I utilize the open-source network analysis and visualization software package Gephi, which allows users to analyze and interact with the network representation, manipulate the structures, shapes and colors and perform various operations, in order to reveal hidden features and patterns of the networks examined.

In the terrorist network, I observed that terrorists formed local operational clusters or cells with relatively few paths between them passing through two main regulatory individuals, thus protecting the cover-up nature of the network and realized that the removal of these regulatory nodes would probably disrupt the network. Furthermore, the Diseasome provided useful insight on the way diseases are connected to each other, according their underlying genetic substrate. I observed that one is able to categorize diseases in new and innovative ways, which may lead to novel treatments by utilizing their shared genetic characteristics.