We finally got the alpha release of the new tsna package up on CRAN! The goal is for the package to be a repository of algorithms and techniques for doing Social Network Analysis on longitudinal networks stored as networkDynamic objects. It includes:

• Code for finding forward temporal paths through networks which will hopefully serve as the basis of lots of extensions of centrality measures.
• Tools for evaluating durations of ties, rates of change, etc
• Measures of sequence (Gibson’s p-shifts) from the relevent package
• Static projections of dynamic networks
• And of course it has wrappers for evaluating standard ‘static’ SNA metrics at multiple time points and returning a time series (using the ergm and sna packages).

The package vignette has lots more details.

As a quick example, the code below extracts a forward temporal path (think “what is the earliest journey a message could take from vertex 10 to each vertex in the network while respecting edge timing”) and plots it as a transmission tree, including the transmission time for each edge:

# load the libraries
library(tsna)
library(ndtv)
# load a dynamic network example
data("moodyContactSim")
# compute the forward temporal path from vertex 10 at time 0
v10path< -tPath(moodyContactSim,10)
# plotting trees still a little complicated, 
# but with Graphviz and ndtv we can do it
plot(v10path,
    coord=network.layout.animate.Graphviz(as.network(v10path),
          layout.par = list(gv.engine='dot')),
    edge.label.col='blue',
    main='earliest fwd path transmission times from vertex 10')