Advanced RSiena Workshop

From 24th to 27th October 2017, the Advanced RSiena and Relational Event Models workshop was held as a continuation of the previous week's basic course. The leaders of the workshop were Christoph Stadtfeld, Timon Elmer and Zsófia Boda, all from ETH Zürich's researchers and James Hollway from Geneva University. The first half of the course was aimed to upgrade users of Stochastic Actor Oriented Models (SAOMs) with cutting-edge knowledge in the RSiena environment. Topics included but not exclusively focus on multilevel modeling of network dynamics using multilevel Siena, and Bayesian estimation using sienaBayes. It was expected that users bring their own dataset or alternatively, they could freely use the RECENS school network panel during the course.

The second half of the course offered an introduction to the statistical analysis of relational events. Course participants were among the first ones after the EUSN conference in Mainz to get to know the Goldfish package in R for estimating Dynamic Network Actor Models (DyNAM). The Goldfish package in R allows the study of time-stamped network data using a variety of models. In particular, it implements different types of Dynamic Network Actor Models (DyNAMs), a class of models that is tailored to the study of actor-oriented network processess through time. Goldfish also implements different versions of the tie-oriented Relational Event Model by Carter Butts.