Relational event models for longitudinal network data with an application to interhospital patient transfers

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to introduce and illustrate relational event models, a new class of statistical models for the analysis of time‐stamped data with complex temporal and relational dependencies. We outline the main differences between recently proposed relational event models and more conventional network models based on the graph‐theoretic formalism typically adopted in empirical studies of social networks. Our main contribution involves the definition and implementation of a marked point process extension of currently available models. According to this approach, the sequence of events of interest is decomposed into two components: (a) event time and (b) event destination...