Anime is the term used for animated shows originating from Japan. It’s essentially just a specific medium of TV shows. Anime has been rising extremely quickly in popularity during the past few years, slowly becoming mainstream. I was curious to see what the driving few Animes that got it this far were. I stumbled upon a research paper conducted by Canggih Puspo Wibowo which uses Graph Theory to determine how similar Anime are to each other, and what few Animes are the driving forces for it gaining so much popularity.
The paper’s goal was to create a Minimum Spanning Tree using some factors connecting various Anime based on how similar they are. A Minimum Spanning Tree is an undirected weighted graph with no cycles, and all nodes are connected where the edges are the minimum total weighting possible. By determining what is at the centre of this Minimum Spanning Tree, you could find out what is the most similar amongst all nodes. This is a very useful technique when trying to create an algorithm for a recommendation system, where you want to recommend a node to a user based on what they already like.
To construct the Minimum Spanning Tree, the paper used 4 main measurements, Degree Centrality, Eigenvector Centrality, Betweenness Centrality, and Closeness Centrality. In class, we discussed the representation and how to compute the degree, closeness (distance), and betweenness of a particular node. These are ideal ways of determining the relationship between nodes to each other. Taking the Euclidean distance of these 4 values gives you the total Centrality of a node. This value was used to generate a Minimum Spanning Tree with a large dataset of Anime, and the following Graph was formed:
Based on this graph, there were 3 nodes that were at the centre of everything. These 3 nodes totalling up the 4 measurement values used ended up being the Animes One Piece, Naruto, and Bleach. Below you can see the 4 different measurement values tested as well as the total values.
For those of you that have watched Anime or even heard of it, you’ve definitely heard of these 3. They are usually where most people started their journeys with Anime. It now makes sense why these are very popular and the standard starting Anime for most people, because they are essentially the foundation of Anime. All other Animes build off from what these 3 started. They are the OGs of Anime. You can also realize that out of all people that watch Anime, you will know very few that dislike one of these Anime.
Here you can find the full Research Paper to dig deeper on the methods used to determine these results. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.03048.pdf