FAQ

FAQ#

How do I retrieve a vertex by its property map value?#

There are two ways to achieve this. The first is using the find_vertex() function that searches for all vertices with a given property map value. However, this function has a \(O(N)\) complexity, where \(N\) is the number of nodes. This means that it can be inefficient if the search is performed frequently.

The second approach is to perform this lookup quickly, in \(O(1)\) time, but it requires the user to keep her own dictionary that maps vertices to property values, e.g.:

>>> from collections import defaultdict
>>> g = gt.Graph()
>>> g.gp.vmap = g.new_gp("object", val=defaultdict(list))
>>> def add_vertex(g, prop, value):
...    v = g.add_vertex()
...    prop[v] = value
...    g.gp.vmap[value].append(v)
...    return g
>>> name = g.new_vp("string")
>>> add_vertex(g, name, "bob")
<...>
>>> add_vertex(g, name, "eve")
<...>
>>> add_vertex(g, name, "steve")
<...>
>>> g.gp.vmap["eve"]
[<Vertex object with index '1' at 0x...>]

Why not include this functionality automatically?

Property map values are not guaranteed to be unique, therefore there’s no inherent bijection between property map values and their corresponding vertices.

Note that, in the example above, the user still needs to manually modify g.gp.vmap whenever a value of the property map name has changed. To enforce this kind of bookkeeping throughout the library would incur a prohibitive performance cost — not to mention a significant increase in complexity.

Is it possible to perform modularity maximization with graph-tool?#

It is in fact possible to perform modularity maximization with graph-tool. For that you need to use the ModularityState object instead of graph_tool.inference.BlockState, as documented in the section Inferring modular network structure, e.g.

>>> g = gt.collection.data["football"]
>>> state = gt.minimize_blockmodel_dl(g, state=gt.ModularityState)

Danger

Using modularity maximization is almost always a terrible idea.

Modularity maximization is a substantially inferior method to the inference-based ones that are implemented in graph-tool, since it does not possess any kind of statistical regularization. Among many other problems, the method tends to massively overfit empirical data.

For a more detailed explanation see “Modularity maximization considered harmful”, as well as [peixoto-descriptive-2023].

Do not use this approach in the analysis of networks without understanding the consequences. This algorithm is included only for comparison purposes. In general, the inference-based approaches based on BlockState, NestedBlockState, and PPBlockState should be universally preferred.

How do I cite graph-tool?#

You can cite graph-tool in your publications as follows:

Tiago P. Peixoto, “The graph-tool python library”, figshare. (2014) DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.1164194 [sci-hub, @tor]

Here is a more convenient BibTeX entry:

@article{peixoto_graph-tool_2014,
         title = {The graph-tool python library},
         url = {http://figshare.com/articles/graph_tool/1164194},
         doi = {10.6084/m9.figshare.1164194},
         urldate = {2014-09-10},
         journal = {figshare},
         author = {Peixoto, Tiago P.},
         year = {2014},
         keywords = {all, complex networks, graph, network, other}}

More information can be found at the figshare site.

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