pathways: Most frequent time-respecting routes

In Dynet: Tidy Temporal Network Analysis

Most frequent time-respecting routes

Description

pathways() reports whole journeys rather than per-vertex summaries: one row per distinct route, ranked by how many optimal routes follow it. It answers "which pathways does this network actually use", where path_trajectories() answers "where do the routes diverge" and paths() answers "who is reachable".

Usage

pathways(dn, from = NULL, top = NULL, min_hops = 1L, ..., plot = FALSE)

Arguments

dn	A temporal network from dynet().
from	Optional source vertex. A name gives the routes leaving that vertex, and several names give the routes leaving each of them. The default, NULL, pools every vertex, which is the network-wide question, and is the only case that adds a from column naming each route's source; a named source is already the first step of every route string.
top	Optional number of routes to keep, most frequent first. The default keeps all of them.
min_hops	Shortest route to report. Defaults to one, which drops the zero-hop route from a vertex to itself.
...	Passed to paths(), so start, end, at, direction, sessions and traversal_time all apply.
plot	Whether to draw the result as well as return it. Drawing is a side effect in the manner of graphics::hist(): the verb still returns its tidy table, invisibly when it has drawn, so plot = TRUE saves the wrapping plot() call without changing what comes back. Use plot() on the result when the figure needs arguments of its own.

Details

The result is already ordered and already carries the share of the total, so a caller never sorts or subsets it; top limits it in the call.

Routes are keyed on their vertex sequence. The trajectory tree keys a node on vertex and time, so one sequence realised through different contacts appears there as several branches; those are one pathway here and their counts are added. Under the foremost criterion this loses nothing: only earliest-arrival routes survive to be counted, so duplicates of a sequence necessarily share an arrival time, and a test asserts it.

Value

An object of class dynet_pathways, a data frame with one row per distinct route, most frequent first: route, the vertex sequence joined by arrows; endpoint, where it lands; count, how many optimal routes follow it; share, its fraction of every counted route, so the shares of a result limited by top do not sum to one; n_hops; and arrival_time, the earliest time the route lands. Pooling over every source adds from as the first column. Use as.data.frame() for a plain frame and as.data.frame(x, what = "steps") for the per-hop timing of the routes that were kept.

An unknown from raises dynet_unknown_node; a top or min_hops that is not one finite number in range raises dynet_bad_input; and a query that leaves no route of at least min_hops hops raises dynet_empty_result. Conditions raised by paths() on the arguments passed through ... reach the caller unchanged.

See Also

paths() for reachability, path_trajectories() for the prefix tree those routes share.

Examples

dn <- dynet(school_contacts)
pathways(dn, from = "Ana")
pathways(dn, from = c("Ana", "Ben", "Kira"), top = 5)

Dynet documentation built on Oct. 7, 2026, 5:08 p.m.