Add Edges to a Network Object

Add one or more edges to an existing network object.

add.edge(
  x,
  tail,
  head,
  names.eval = NULL,
  vals.eval = NULL,
  edge.check = FALSE,
  ...
)

add.edges(x, tail, head, names.eval = NULL, vals.eval = NULL, ...)

Arguments

x

an object of class network

tail

for add.edge, a vector of vertex IDs reflecting the tail set for the edge to be added; for add.edges, a list of such vectors

head

for add.edge, a vector of vertex IDs reflecting the head set for the edge to be added; for add.edges, a list of such vectors

names.eval

for add.edge, an optional list of names for edge attributes; for add.edges, a list of length equal to the number of edges, with each element containing a list of names for the attributes of the corresponding edge

vals.eval

for add.edge, an optional list of edge attribute values (matching names.eval); for add.edges, a list of such lists

edge.check

logical; should we perform (computationally expensive) tests to check for the legality of submitted edges?

...

additional arguments

Value

Invisibly, add.edge and add.edges return pointers to their modified arguments; both functions modify their arguments in place..

Details

The edge checking procedure is very slow, but should always be employed when debugging; without it, one cannot guarantee that the network state is consistent with network level variables (see network.indicators). For example, by default it is possible to add multiple edges to a pair of vertices.

Edges can also be added/removed via the extraction/replacement operators. See the associated man page for details.

Note

add.edges and add.edge were converted to an S3 generic funtions in version 1.9, so they actually call add.edges.network and add.edge.network by default, and may call other versions depending on context (i.e. when called with a networkDynamic object).

References

Butts, C. T. (2008). “network: a Package for Managing Relational Data in R.” Journal of Statistical Software, 24(2). doi:10.18637/jss.v024.i02

See also

network, add.vertices, network.extraction, delete.edges, network.edgelist

Author

Carter T. Butts buttsc@uci.edu

Examples

#Initialize a small, empty network
g<-network.initialize(3)

#Add an edge
add.edge(g,1,2)
g
#>  Network attributes:
#>   vertices = 3 
#>   directed = TRUE 
#>   hyper = FALSE 
#>   loops = FALSE 
#>   multiple = FALSE 
#>   bipartite = FALSE 
#>   total edges= 1 
#>     missing edges= 0 
#>     non-missing edges= 1 
#> 
#>  Vertex attribute names: 
#>     vertex.names 
#> 
#> No edge attributes

#Can also add edges using the extraction/replacement operators
#note that replacement operators are much slower than add.edges()
g[,3]<-1
g[,]
#>   1 2 3
#> 1 0 1 1
#> 2 0 0 1
#> 3 0 0 0

#Add multiple edges with attributes to a network

# pretend we just loaded in this data.frame from a file
# Note: network.edgelist() may be simpler for this case
elData<-data.frame(
  from_id=c("1","2","3","1","3","1","2"),
  to_id=c("1", "1", "1", "2", "2", "3", "3"),
  myEdgeWeight=c(1, 2, 1, 2, 5, 3, 9.5),
  someLetters=c("B", "W", "L", "Z", "P", "Q", "E"),
  edgeCols=c("red","green","blue","orange","pink","brown","gray"),
  stringsAsFactors=FALSE
)

valueNet<-network.initialize(3,loops=TRUE)

add.edges(valueNet,elData[,1],elData[,2],
    names.eval=rep(list(list("myEdgeWeight","someLetters","edgeCols")),nrow(elData)), 
    vals.eval=lapply(1:nrow(elData),function(r){as.list(elData[r,3:5])}))

list.edge.attributes(valueNet)
#> [1] "edgeCols"     "myEdgeWeight" "na"           "someLetters"