ArticleMethods in ecology and evolution2021
Common datastream permutations of animal social network data are not appropriate for hypothesis testing using regression models.
Article in Methods in ecology and evolution, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 31 papers.
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Who cites it
31 citing papers in PubMed.
- Bayesian multiplex network models in R using STRAND: methods for biologists and social scientists.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- A causal framework for the drivers of animal social network structure.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Population age structure shapes selection on social behaviour in a long-lived insect.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Social tolerance and success-biased social learning underlie the cultural transmission of an induced extractive foraging tradition in a wild tool-using primate.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Long-term cooperative relationships among vampire bats are not strongly predicted by their initial interactions.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2024Article
- The adaptive value of density-dependent habitat specialization and social network centrality.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Spatiotemporal-social association predicts immunological similarity in rewilded mice.Science advances · 2023Article
- BISoN: A Bayesian Framework for Inference of Social Networks.Methods in ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Bullying as an advertisement of social dominance in common waxbills.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Indirect genetic effects for social network structure inPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Familiarity, age, weaning and health status impact social proximity networks in dairy calves.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Refining the stress gradient hypothesis for mixed species groups of African mammals.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Group and individual social network metrics are robust to changes in resource distribution in experimental populations of forked fungus beetles.The Journal of animal ecology · 2022Article
- Flock-species richness influences node importance and modularity in mixed-species flock networks.Oecologia · 2022Article
- Permutation tests for hypothesis testing with animal social network data: Problems and potential solutions.Methods in ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Common permutation methods in animal social network analysis do not control for non-independence.Behavioral ecology and sociobiology · 2022Article
- Linking parasitism to network centrality and the impact of sampling bias in its interpretation.PeerJ · 2022Article
- Respiratory Disease Risk of Zoo-Housed Bonobos Is Associated with Sex and Betweenness Centrality in the Proximity Network.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2021Article
- A guide to choosing and implementing reference models for social network analysis.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2021Review
- Multilayer social networks reveal the social complexity of a cooperatively breeding bird.iScience · 2021Article
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6 authors.
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Abstract
1. Social network methods have become a key tool for describing, modelling, and testing hypotheses about the social structures of animals. However, due to the non-independence of network data and the presence of confounds, specialized statistical techniques are often needed to test hypotheses in these networks. Datastream permutations, originally developed to test the null hypothesis of random social structure, have become a popular tool for testing a wide array of null hypotheses in animal social networks. In particular, they have been used to test whether exogenous factors are related to network structure by interfacing these permutations with regression models. 2. Here, we show that these datastream permutations typically do not represent the null hypothesis of interest to researchers interfacing animal social network analysis with regression modelling, and use simulations to demonstrate the potential pitfalls of using this methodology. 3. Our simulations show that, if used to indicate whether a relationship exists between network structure and a covariate, datastream permutations can result in extremely high type I error rates, in some cases approaching 50%. In the same set of simulations, traditional node-label permutations produced appropriate type I error rates (~ 5%). 4. Our analysis shows that datastream permutations do not represent the appropriate null hypothesis for these analyses. We suggest that potential alternatives to this procedure may be found in regarding the problems of non-independence of network data and unreliability of observations separately. If biases introduced during data collection can be corrected, either prior to model fitting or within the model itself, node-label permutations then serve as a useful test for interfacing animal social network analysis with regression modelling.
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