get_partners: Return the Historical Contacts (Partners) of a Set of Index Nodes

Description

From a full cumulative edgelist that contains the history of contacts (both persistent and one-time), this function returns a data frame containing details of the index (head) and partner (tail) nodes, along with start and stop time steps for the partnership and the network location.

Usage

get_partners(
  dat,
  index_posit_ids,
  networks = NULL,
  truncate = Inf,
  only.active.nodes = FALSE
)

Value

A data.frame with 5 columns:

index: the unique IDs of the indexes.
partner: the unique IDs of the partners/contacts.
start: the time step at which the edge started.
stop: the time step in which the edge stopped; if ongoing, then NA is returned.
network: the numerical index for the network on which the partnership/contact is located.

Arguments

dat: Main netsim_dat object containing a networkDynamic object and other initialization information passed from netsim.
index_posit_ids: The positional IDs of the indexes of interest.
networks: Numerical indexes of the networks to extract the partnerships from. (May be > 1 for models with multi-layer networks.) If NULL, extract from all networks.
truncate: After how many time steps a partnership that is no longer active should be removed from the output.
only.active.nodes: If TRUE, then inactive (e.g., deceased) partners will be removed from the output.

Details

Note that get_partners takes as input the positional IDs of the indexes of interest but returns the unique IDs. That is by design, because while get_partners would be expected to be called for active nodes, some partners (contacts) of nodes may be inactive in the network history. Therefore, both index and partner IDs are returned as unique IDs for consistency. To convert between a positional to a unique ID, you may use get_posit_ids; to convert between a unique ID to a positional ID, you may use get_unique_ids.