Analysing the House Stark main characters in the Game of Thrones Series

Game of Thrones is a popular TV show where Nine noble families wage war against each other in order to gain control over the mythical land of Westeros. In this analysis, we focus on the major characters in House Stark - Arya, Jon and Sansa Stark.

First, we plot a histogram of the degree of the nodes in the network of these three characters. The degree of a node is the measure of how many neighbors it has in the network.

From the histogram we see that there are few nodes with high connections(degrees) and many nodes with small connections. We will explore which of the characters has the most connections shortly, in the network analysis.

Robert is the most central node or point of connection between Arya, Jon and Sansa and this is very simple to explain because he is their father. However we see he has a very small node as he dies very early in the series. We also see that each of these characters despite being siblings their own interaction circles as they get seperated from one another after their dad was publicly executed. Arya and Sansa have some characters they bothe interacted with at some point in the series, Cersei who was supposed to Sansa’s mother-in-law and Bran who is their brother but also died early on in the series.

Detecting Communities

The Louvain Algorithm

There’s a unique connection between Tyrion and Sansa even though they are both in different communities. This is because somewhere in the series, they begin to interact after Tyrion saves Sansa from a forced marriage. Sansa and Arya also have connections with Jon, but Jon seems to be isolated from both of them as the only connections between him and his sisters are with Robert.

The Edge- Between Algorithm

Sansa and Arya have more connections between them than Jon has with any of them.

Densely connected nodes

Sansa has the strongest connections in the network and Jon has the weakest. In the end, this pays off for her as she becomes queen in the north.

Nodes Edges MeanDegree SDDegree Isolates AvgClustering
51 60 2.352941 4.778383 0 0.0506135

Distance; it takes about 2.45 (2.447843) steps to get from one node to another in the network graph

Reciprocity; We have a reciprocity of 0 which means there are no mutual edges in the graph.

Assortativity; We have an assortativity of -0.08346024. This indicates that there is a slight tendency for nodes in the graph to connect to nodes with different attributes rather than nodes with similar attributes.

Sansa has the highest score of 1.0, making her the most important node in this network. Arya follows closely with 0.8404530 , then Jon, then others.

Clustering; Clustering is only detected between the three main characters, other characters they interact with outwardly never get to meet the other characters in-between them.

References

Data Source - https://github.com/melaniewalsh/sample-social-network-datasets/tree/master/sample-datasets/game-of-thrones

Netwrok of Thrones Idea - https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/Mathhorizons/NetworkofThrones%20%281%29.pdf