We need to tell Cytoscape that the edge list we’ve provided contains Sources in one column and Targets in another. Edge attributes can come in handy, as I’ll explain below, but that’s not what you’ve provided Cytoscape at the moment. You can tell that’s the case because the icon that appears next to the words actors and films looks sort of like a document, which means that Cytoscape thinks that you’ve fed it a list of edge attributes, not edges themselves. You need to tell Cytoscape which parts of your data constitute the entities in your network diagram.Ĭytoscape hasn’t understood right away that you want a network composed of film and actor nodes. The screen that pops up after you imported your edge list might be the most initially confusing part of Cytoscape, although it’s no problem once you figure out what it wants. Someone might have disabled it, but you can accomplish the same thing by clicking on the Import Network from File button (circled below) and selecting your edge list. (If not, read on for instructions on how to accomplish the same thing without the welcome screen.)ĭrop the network file you downloaded previously into the pane labeled Drag network files here. You should be greeted with a welcome pane that looks something like the one below. If you need specific guidance on setting up your edge list, see Preparing Data 1: Making an Edge List.Ĭytoscape can interpret both Excel documents and their generic equivalent, the CSV. But there should be two different kinds of things, at most, described in two columns. For example, Person A could have written Book A, while Person B published Book A. The nature of those relationships can differ. ![]() The important thing here is that your edge list should contain a list of relationships between, at most, two kinds of entities (e.g., actors and films, people and preferences, people and books). Person A shares a preference with Person B.Person A possesses a preference for Thing A.Actor A appears in a film with Actor B.Other kinds of relationships you could describe in an edge list: All that matters here is that each row in my spreadsheet describes a connection between two entities. The columns could be reordered so that the Films column precedes the Actors column it doesn’t matter. In the image below, my edge list contains two kinds of things: films and actors. The objects in the first column should be connected in some way to the objects in the second column. At its most basic, Cytoscape wants a spreadsheet containing two columns. The most important thing to understand about Cytoscape (or, really, most network analysis tools) is the format in which you need to structure your data. (You should also, however, be able to follow these tutorials if you have your own data you’d like to use.) 1. It contains actors and films from the silent era of American race film ( source). We’ll also look at how to transform a bimodal graph into a unimodal graph, and we’ll walk through the process of publishing your graph to the web.įor this tutorial, please download this spreadsheet and save it somewhere you can find it again. We’ll start by building a basic graph and then work with more advanced features, like attributes and calculations. Along the way, you’ll come to understand some of these network concepts more fully. This set of tutorials will walk you through the process of building a network graph in Cytoscape. In addition, Scott Weingart has a great introduction to network analysis. ![]() Cytoscape is not too hard to use, but it won’t make much sense unless you have a sense of some basic network analysis vocabulary and concepts.
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