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SIENA in R

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James Hollway edited this page Jul 2, 2020 · 4 revisions

The SIENA methods are available in RSiena, which is a package of the statistical system R. RSiena can be executed on all platforms for which R is available: Windows, Mac, Unix/Linux. R can be downloaded from the Comprehensive R Archive Network https://cran.r-project.org, and RSiena can be loaded as one of the packages in R. In addition,there is a package RSienaTest which may include additional options that are still in the testing stage. RSiena can be installed in the usual way from CRAN, but the most recent versions of RSiena/Test can be downloaded from R-Forge. For downloading RSiena and RSienaTest, and for differences between the CRAN avd R-Forge versions, see the Siena downloads page. Note that the R-Forge version is updated more frequently than the CRAN version, as explained there.

The original development of RSiena, building on the earlier Siena (stand-alone and part of the Stocnet suite) was part of the project Adolescent Peer Social Network Dynamics and Problem Behavior, funded by NIH (Grant Number 1R01HD052887-01A2), Principal Investigator John M. Light (Oregon Research Institute). RSiena was originally programmed by Ruth Ripley and Krists Boitmanis, in collaboration with Tom Snijders. Several others have been contributing since then: Josh Lospinoso, Charlotte Greenan, Christian Steglich, Johan Koskinen, Felix Schönenberger, Mark Ortmann, Natalie Indlekofer, and Nynke Niezink. The maintainer is Tom Snijders. We are continuing with the extension of the package. The fact that R is open source implies that the source is available (most easily from R-Forge, see below) and the project is open to contributions by other researchers who know how to program in R and/or C/C++. RSiena replaces the older Windows-based SIENA version 3, which still is available from the downloads page, but no longer maintained.

RSiena can be operated in several ways. The best (most complete) functionality is obtained by executing RSiena entirely within R, using the R functions supplied by this package. An alternative option is to access RSiena from visone; a short guide is available at the visone website.

The installation and operation of RSiena are explained in the users' manual. It includes information on how to install RSiena, and help on getting started with operating RSiena in R. In addition, it gives extensive descriptions of the methods available in RSiena. This complements the help pages of the functions that can be consulted within R.

Example scripts are at the RSiena scripts page, and a lot of introductory and advanced material about the methodology is at the literature page. There is news, with information about bugs if any important errors are currently known, at the news page.

RSiena and its manual are being updated rather frequently at R-Forge.

Downloads/links

  • R install commands:
  • For downloading RSiena and RSienaTest, go to the Siena downloads page.
  • You can download the current RSiena users' manual.
  • Some websites and resources that can be very helpful for the beginning R user:
    • Excellent simple intro to R from Princeton.
    • General information about R from UCLA.
    • Impatient R, previously Some Hints for the R Beginner, by Patrick Burns with the memorable quote
    • "I asked R users what their biggest stumbling blocks were in learning R. A common answer that I was quite surprised by was that the biggest stumbling block was thinking that R was hard".
    • icebreakeR by Andrew Robinson.
    • Quick R website (intended especially for experienced users of other statistical software).
    • R-bloggers tutorials for learning R by Tal Galili.
    • The official R intro.
  • Further general help on R:
    • Course on R and R programming by Ruth Ripley.
    • The "Documentation" links on http://cran.r-project.org
    • R reference card.
    • RStudio, an integrated development environment (IDE) for R, available for all major platforms (like g Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux). This is an alternative to the R gui available for Windows.
    • Another alternative, or rather a convenient complement, is NpptoR, which easily passes on code from the Notepad++ editor (which has nice syntax highlighting) to R.
    • An introductory R script for starting with R, using IMF data collected by David de Jong.
    • An introductory R script to learn R for Social Networks applications, using the Lazega lawyers data , which can also be directed downloaded from this directory with data files.
    • Introduction to Social Network Analysis in R by Michal Bojanowski (ICM, University of Warsaw).
    • R-bloggers, a central hub of content collected from bloggers who write about R (in English).
  • The RSiena project on Github.
    • To allow quick access to new versions of RSiena without bothering too much the maintainers of the R archive, current and beta versions will be made available on Github.
    • The RSiena repository contains two main branches: one for the regular package RSiena and the other for the 'experimental' package RSienaTest, which may contain elements that are less extensively tested.
    • Note that you can 'star' or 'watch' this repository or any particular issues to get updates.
  • The RSiena information at CRAN (the Comprehensive R Archive Network). Note that Github usually has a more recent version.
  • RSiena can also be accessed from visone; a short guide is available at the visone website.
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