backbone: An R Package for extracting the backbone of bipartite projections

TL;DR

The paper introduces an R package called backbone that extracts significant unweighted subgraphs from weighted bipartite projections, aiding analysis and visualization across various network contexts.

Contribution

It presents a new R package for extracting backbones from bipartite projections, facilitating analysis of complex weighted networks.

Findings

Demonstrated package functionality using US Senate bill sponsorship data.

Provided a tool for simplifying weighted bipartite networks.

Enhanced network analysis and visualization capabilities.

Abstract

Bipartite projections are used in a wide range of network contexts including politics (bill co-sponsorship), genetics (gene co-expression), economics (executive board co-membership), and innovation (patent co-authorship). However, because bipartite projections are always weighted graphs, which are inherently challenging to analyze and visualize, it is often useful to examine the 'backbone', an unweighted subgraph containing only the most significant edges. In this paper, we introduce the R package backbone for extracting the backbone of weighted bipartite projections, and use bill sponsorship data from the 114th session of the United States Senate to demonstrate its functionality.