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Nodal Heterogeneity can Induce Ghost Triadic Effects in Relational Event Models

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

Rūta Juozaitienė Open the ORCID record for Rūta Juozaitienė [Opens in a new window]  and
Ernst C. Wit
Rūta Juozaitienė*
Affiliation:
Vytautas Magnus University
Ernst C. Wit
Affiliation:
Università della Svizzera italiana
*
Correspondence should be made to Rūta Juozaitien˙e, Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania. [email protected]
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Abstract

Temporal network data is often encoded as time-stamped interaction events between senders and receivers, such as co-authoring scientific articles or communication via email. A number of relational event frameworks have been proposed to address specific issues raised by complex temporal dependencies. These models attempt to quantify how individual behaviour, endogenous and exogenous factors, as well as interactions with other individuals modify the network dynamics over time. It is often of interest to determine whether changes in the network can be attributed to endogenous mechanisms reflecting natural relational tendencies, such as reciprocity or triadic effects. The propensity to form or receive ties can also, at least partially, be related to actor attributes. Nodal heterogeneity in the network is often modelled by including actor-specific or dyadic covariates. However, comprehensively capturing all personality traits is difficult in practice, if not impossible. A failure to account for heterogeneity may confound the substantive effect of key variables of interest. This work shows that failing to account for node level sender and receiver effects can induce ghost triadic effects. We propose a random-effect extension of the relational event model to deal with these problems. We show that it is often effective over more traditional approaches, such as in-degree and out-degree statistics. These results that the violation of the hierarchy principle due to insufficient information about nodal heterogeneity can be resolved by including random effects in the relational event model as a standard.

Keywords

relational event modellingtriadic effectshierarchy principlerandom effectspopularityexpansiveness
Type
Theory & Methods
Information
Psychometrika , Volume 89 , Issue 1 , March 2024 , pp. 151 - 171
Copyright
Copyright © 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive licence to The Psychometric Society.

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