Network From Distances
======================

Constructs a network from distances between instances.

**Inputs**

- Distances: A distance matrix.

**Outputs**

- Network: An instance of Network Graph.
- Data: Attribute-valued data set.
- Distances: A distance matrix.

**Network from Distances** constructs a network graph from a given distance matrix. Graph is constructed by connecting nodes from the matrix where the distance between nodes is below the given threshold. In other words, all instances with a distance lower than the selected threshold, will be connected.

![](images/network-from-distances-stamped.png)

1. Edges:
   - Distance threshold: a closeness threshold for the formation of edges.
   - Percentile: the percentile of data instances to be connected.
   - *Include also closest neighbors*: include a number of closest neighbors to the selected instances.
2. Node selection:
   - Keep all nodes: entire network is on the output.
   - Components with at least X nodes: filters out nodes with less than the set number of nodes.
   - Largest connected component: keep only the largest cluster.
3. Edge weights:
   - Proportional to distance: weights are set to reflect the distance (closeness).
   - Inverted distance: weights are set to reflect the inverted distance (difference).
4. Information on the constructed network:
   - Data items on input: number of instances on the input.
   - Network nodes: number of nodes in the network (and the percentage of the original data).
   - Network edges: number of constructed edges/connections (and the average number of connections per node).

Example
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**Network from Distances** creates networks from distance matrices. It can transform data sets from a data table via distance matrix into a network graph. This widget is great for visualizing instance similarity as a graph of connected instances.

![](images/network-from-distances-example.png)

We took *iris.tab* to visualize instance similarity in a graph. We sent the output of **File** widget to **Distances**, where we computed Euclidean distances between rows (instances). Then we sent the output of **Distances** to **Network from Distances**, where we set the distance threshold (how similar the instances have to be to draw an edge between them) to 0.222. We kept all nodes and set edge weights to *proportional to distance*.

Then we observed the constructed network in a [Network Explorer](networkexplorer.md). We colored the nodes by *iris* attribute.