Data summaries and representations: Definitions and practical use

The chapter “Data Summaries and Representations: Definitions and Practical Use” examines data structures used to deal with complex networked data, using temporal networks as a concrete case. Complex networked data has become available in a variety of contexts, describing a variety of systems with growing abundance of details, such as, for instance, links between individuals in social networks, or the temporal evolution of these links. However, data needs to be summarized and represented in simple forms. This chapter describes several commonly used data summaries and levels of representation of temporal networks, as well as novel data representations that have been developed through the MULTIPLEX project. It focuses in particular on the case of temporal networks of contacts between individuals and shows in a series of concrete use cases how different representations can be used to characterize and compare data, or feed data-driven models of epidemic spreading processes.