fastnet: An R Package for Fast Simulation and Analysis of Large-Scale Social Networks

Abstract

Traditional tools and software for social network analysis are seldom scalable and/or fast. This paper provides an overview of an R package called fastnet, a tool for scaling and speeding up the simulation and analysis of large-scale social networks. fastnet uses multi-core processing and sub-graph sampling algorithms to achieve the desired scale-up and speed-up. Simple examples, usages, and comparisons of scale-up and speed-up as compared to other R packages, i.e., igraph and statnet, are presented.

Keywords

• social network analysis
• network simulation
• network metrics
• multi-core processing
• sampling