Time is of the essence: an application of a relational event model for animal social networks

Understanding how animal social relationships are created, maintained and severed has ecological and evolutionary significance. Animal social relationships are inferred from observations of interactions between animals; the pattern of interaction over time indicates the existence (or absence) of a social relationship. Autonomous behavioural recording technologies are increasingly being used to collect continuous interaction data on animal associations. However, continuous data sequences are typically aggregated to represent a relationship as part of one (or several) pictures of the network of relations among animals, in a way that parallels human social networks. This transformation entails loss of information about interaction timing and sequence, which are particularly important to understand the formation of relationships or their disruption. Here, we describe a new statistical model, termed the relational event model, that enables the analysis of fine-grained animal association data as a continuous time sequence without requiring aggregation of the data. We apply the model to a unique data set of interaction between familiar and unfamiliar steers during a series of 36 experiments to investigate the process of social disruption and relationship formation. We show how the model provides key insights into animal behaviour in terms of relationship building, the integration process of unfamiliar animals and group building dynamics. The relational event model is well suited to data structures that are common to animal behavioural studies and can therefore be applied to a range of social interaction data to understand animal social dynamics. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s00265-015-1883-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.