Real world networks come in all shapes and sizes, depending on the specific dataset we are dealing with. In particular, many networks of interest are disconnected, meaning that they can be separated into distinct subgraphs that have no edges connecting them.
In this post we explore a real world Twitter network and use it to better understand the various ways to define connected components.
Connected Components
A graph is said to be connected if there is an Undirected Path connecting every pair of nodes. If some nodes are unreachable, then the network is said to be disconnected or have multiple components. Let us consider a simple example:
