Grouping a many-to-many relationship from a two-column map

Question

I have a SQL table that maps, say, authors and books. I would like to group linked authors and books (books written by the same author, and authors who co-wrote a book) toge

Answer 1

Here's a go re-hashing my answer to an old question of mine that Josh O'Brien linked in the comments ( identify groups of linked episodes which chain together ). This answer uses the igraph library.

# Dummy data that might be easier to interpret to show it worked
# Authors 1,2 and 3,4 should group. author 5 is a group to themselves
aubk <- data.frame(author_id=c(1,2,3,4,5),book_id=c(1,1,2,2,5))

# identify authors with a bit of leading text to prevent clashes 
# with the book ids
aubk$author_id2 <- paste0("au",aubk$author_id)

library(igraph)
#create a graph - this needs to be matrix input
au_graph <- graph.edgelist(as.matrix(aubk[c("author_id2","book_id")]))
# get the ids of the authors
result <- data.frame(author_id=names(au_graph[1]),stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
# get the corresponding group membership of the authors
result$group <- clusters(au_graph)$membership

# subset to only the authors data
result <- result[substr(result$author_id,1,2)=="au",]
# make the author_id variable numeric again
result$author_id <- as.numeric(substr(result$author_id,3,nchar(result$author_id)))

> result
  author_id group
1         1     1
3         2     1
4         3     2
6         4     2
7         5     3