read_egonet function

Read ego-centered network data exported with EgoNet software as an egor object

This function imports ego-centered network data from folders with separate files for alters-level and edge data. It will run some basic checks upon the completeness of the data and inform the user of potential problems. This function can be used to import data exported from EgoNet (McCarty 2011).

read_egonet(
  egos.file,
  alter.folder,
  edge.folder,
  csv.sep = ",",
  ID.vars = list(ego = "egoID", alter = "alterID", source = "Source", target = "Target"),
  first.col.row.names = FALSE,
  ...
)

Arguments

• egos.file: File name of the .csv file containing the ego data.

• alter.folder: Folder name of the folder containing the alter data in separate .csv files for each ego/ network.

• edge.folder: Folder name of the folder containing the edge/ tie data in separate .csv files for each ego/ network.

• csv.sep: Character indicating the separator used in csv files.

• ID.vars: A named list containing column names of the relevant input columns:

  • ego: unique identifier associated with each ego, defaulting to "egoID"; has no effect if alters.df and aaties.df are both lists of data frames.
  • alter: unique-within-ego identifier associated with each alter, defaulting to "alterID"; optional aaties.df are not provided.
  • source: if aaties.df is provided, the column given the alter identifier of the origin of a relation.
  • target: if aaties.df is provided, the column given the alter identifier of the destination of a relation.

• first.col.row.names: Boolean indicating if first column contains row names, that are to be skipped, default is FALSE.

• ...: additional arguments to egor().

Returns

An egor object is returned. It is a list of three data frames: (1) ego: dataframe of all egos and their attributes; (2) alter: dataframe of all alters; (3) aatie: dataframe of alter alter ties/ edges

Examples

egos.file <-  system.file("extdata", "egos_32.csv", package = "egor")
alters.folder <- system.file("extdata", "alters_32", package = "egor")
edge.folder <-  system.file("extdata", "edges_32", package = "egor")

ef <- read_egonet(egos.file = egos.file, 
                          alter.folder = alters.folder, 
                          edge.folder = edge.folder, 
                          csv.sep = ";")