How the Avengers Assembled? Analysis of Marvel Hero Social Network

The movies of Marvel universe are very popular among young people. Almost every young people nowadays know some of the heroes in Marvel universe, such as iron man and spider man. The data set named The Marvel Universe Social Network (MUSN) describe the social relationships of the heroes. By analyzing the MUSN, we establish a social network of Marvel heroes. We derive some basic statistics from the Marvel network, such as the number of nodes and links, the hubs, the components, the shortest path lengths and the diameter. In the next part, we analyze the structure of the Marvel network and obtain some results of the connectedness, the clustering, the degree distribution, the degree correlation. Meanwhile, we fit the power law and divide the network into different communities. In this process, we not only find that the network appears to have the small world nature, since it is obviously a scale-free network, but also find that it is very similar to the real-world social network. Further, based on the work of Loverkar et al., we do a hypothesis test on the small world nature of the network. We find that the Marvel network does have small world property. In the end, we visualize the Marvel network to give a better understanding of the network.