Note

This documents the development version of NetworkX. Documentation for the current release can be found here.

# networkx.algorithms.wiener.wiener_index¶

wiener_index(G, weight=None)[source]

Returns the Wiener index of the given graph.

The Wiener index of a graph is the sum of the shortest-path distances between each pair of reachable nodes. For pairs of nodes in undirected graphs, only one orientation of the pair is counted.

Parameters
• G (NetworkX graph)

• weight (object) – The edge attribute to use as distance when computing shortest-path distances. This is passed directly to the networkx.shortest_path_length() function.

Returns

The Wiener index of the graph G.

Return type

float

Raises

NetworkXError – If the graph G is not connected.

Notes

If a pair of nodes is not reachable, the distance is assumed to be infinity. This means that for graphs that are not strongly-connected, this function returns inf.

The Wiener index is not usually defined for directed graphs, however this function uses the natural generalization of the Wiener index to directed graphs.

Examples

The Wiener index of the (unweighted) complete graph on n nodes equals the number of pairs of the n nodes, since each pair of nodes is at distance one:

>>> n = 10
>>> G = nx.complete_graph(n)
>>> nx.wiener_index(G) == n * (n - 1) / 2
True


Graphs that are not strongly-connected have infinite Wiener index:

>>> G = nx.empty_graph(2)
>>> nx.wiener_index(G)
inf