A multilevel statistical toolkit to study animal social networks: the Animal Network Toolkit Software (ANTs) R package

Abstract

The possible role played by individual attributes, sociodemographic characteristics and/or ecological pressures in the interaction between animals and the development of social relationships between them is of great interest in animal ecology and evolutionary biology. Social Network Analysis is an ideal tool to study these types of questions. The Animal Network Toolkit Software (ANTs) R package was specifically developed to provide all the different social network analysis techniques currently used in the study of animal social networks. This global package enables users to (1) compute global, polyadic and nodal network measures; (2) perform data randomisation: data stream and network (node and link) permutations; (3) perform statistical permutation tests for static or temporal network analyses, and (4) visualise networks. ANTs allows researchers to perform multilevel network analyses ranging from individual network measures to interaction patterns and the analysis of the overall network structure, and carry out static or temporal network analyses without switching between different R packages, thus making a substantial contribution to advances in the study of animal behaviour. ANTs outperforms existing R packages for the computation speed of network measures and permutations.