Collapse Timeframes in a Longitudinal Edgelist — collapse

Allows users to take a high-resolution or continuous-time longitudinal edgelist and dynamically collapse or discretize it into larger time windows. The output is a shorter, aggregated edgelist ready to be passed into [edgelist_to_adjmat] or [as_diffnet].

collapse_timeframes(
  edgelist,
  ego = "sender",
  alter = "receiver",
  timevar = "time",
  weightvar = NULL,
  window_size = 1,
  time_format = NULL,
  relative_time = TRUE,
  binarize = FALSE,
  cumulative = FALSE,
  symmetric = FALSE
)

Arguments

edgelist: A data.frame representing the longitudinal edgelist.
ego: Character scalar. Name of the column representing the ego (sender).
alter: Character scalar. Name of the column representing the alter (receiver).
timevar: Character scalar. Name of the column representing the time variable.
weightvar: Character scalar or NULL. Name of the column representing the edge weight. If NULL, the function tallies the number of interactions within the time window as the weight.
window_size: Numeric scalar. The size of the time window to collapse into.
time_format: Character scalar or NULL. If the time variable is a character or factor, the format passed to as.POSIXct. For example, "%d-%m-%Y %H:%M".
relative_time: Logical scalar. If TRUE, normalizes the binned times into a strict integer sequence starting at 1 (1, 2, 3...).
binarize: Logical scalar. If TRUE, sets all resulting edge weights to 1.
cumulative: Logical scalar. If TRUE, edges from previous time windows are carried over to subsequent windows.
symmetric: Logical scalar. If TRUE, the resulting graph will be symmetrized (i.e., if an edge A->B exists, an edge B->A is added).

Value

A data.frame with 4 columns: the ego, the alter, the new collapsed discrete time, and the aggregated weight.

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
# Load the package's hourly dataset
load(system.file("data/epigames_raw.rda", package = "netdiffuseR"))

# Collapse the hourly edgelist into a daily edgelist (window_size = 24)
daily_edgelist <- collapse_timeframes(
  edgelist = epigames_raw$edgelist,
  timevar = "time",
  weightvar = "weight",
  window_size = 24
)
head(daily_edgelist)
} # }