collapse_timeframes: Collapse Timeframes in a Longitudinal Edgelist

In netdiffuseR: Analysis of Diffusion and Contagion Processes on Networks

Collapse Timeframes in a Longitudinal Edgelist

Description

Allows users to take a high-resolution or continuous-time longitudinal edgelist and dynamically collapse or discretize it into larger time windows. The output is a shorter, aggregated edgelist ready to be passed into [edgelist_to_adjmat] or [as_diffnet].

Usage

collapse_timeframes(
  edgelist,
  ego = "sender",
  alter = "receiver",
  timevar = "time",
  weightvar = NULL,
  window_size = 1,
  time_format = NULL,
  relative_time = TRUE,
  binarize = FALSE,
  cumulative = FALSE,
  symmetric = FALSE
)

Arguments

edgelist	A data.frame representing the longitudinal edgelist.
ego	Character scalar. Name of the column representing the ego (sender).
alter	Character scalar. Name of the column representing the alter (receiver).
timevar	Character scalar. Name of the column representing the time variable.
weightvar	Character scalar or NULL. Name of the column representing the edge weight. If NULL, the function tallies the number of interactions within the time window as the weight.
window_size	Numeric scalar. The size of the time window to collapse into.
time_format	Character scalar or NULL. If the time variable is a character or factor, the format passed to as.POSIXct. For example, "%d-%m-%Y %H:%M".
relative_time	Logical scalar. If TRUE, normalizes the binned times into a strict integer sequence starting at 1 (1, 2, 3...).
binarize	Logical scalar. If TRUE, sets all resulting edge weights to 1.
cumulative	Logical scalar. If TRUE, edges from previous time windows are carried over to subsequent windows.
symmetric	Logical scalar. If TRUE, the resulting graph will be symmetrized (i.e., if an edge A->B exists, an edge B->A is added).

Value

A data.frame with 4 columns: the ego, the alter, the new collapsed discrete time, and the aggregated weight.

Examples

## Not run: 
# Load the package's hourly dataset
load(system.file("data/epigames_raw.rda", package = "netdiffuseR"))

# Collapse the hourly edgelist into a daily edgelist (window_size = 24)
daily_edgelist <- collapse_timeframes(
  edgelist = epigames_raw$edgelist,
  timevar = "time",
  weightvar = "weight",
  window_size = 24
)
head(daily_edgelist)

## End(Not run)

netdiffuseR documentation built on April 10, 2026, 9:10 a.m.