Exploring complex networks with the ICON R package

TL;DR

The paper introduces ICON, an R package with over a thousand real-world complex network datasets, facilitating research and visualization in the field of network analysis.

Contribution

It provides a large, standardized collection of network datasets and integrates tools for analysis and visualization, promoting consistency and reducing redundant efforts.

Findings

Contains 1075 datasets with citations

Supports network analysis and visualization in R

Aims to standardize complex network research

Abstract

We introduce ICON, an R package that contains 1075 complex network datasets in a standard edgelist format. All provided datasets have associated citations and have been indexed by the Colorado Index of Complex Networks - also referred to as ICON. In addition to supplying a large and diverse corpus of useful real-world networks, ICON also implements an S3 generic to work with the network and ggnetwork R packages for network analysis and visualization, respectively. Sample code in this report also demonstrates how ICON can be used in conjunction with the igraph package. Currently, the Comprehensive R Archive Network hosts ICON v0.4.0. We hope that ICON will serve as a standard corpus for complex network research and prevent redundant work that would be otherwise necessary by individual research groups. The open source code for ICON and for this reproducible report can be found at https://github.com/rrrlw/ICON.