Overview

R package for resampling network metrics/indices (bootstrapping without replacement).

It wraps around the bipartite package functions networklevel and specieslevel.

Assuming a network/web like Safariland from the bipartite package:

library(bipartite)
data(Safariland)

One can sample interactions without replacement from the network until all interactions have been used. The sampling procedure starts with a small sample size to which interactions are added until all are consumed. Every time we sample interactions, a smaller version of the entire network can be built and a network index/metric can be computed. The sampling procedure can be repeated as many times as needed, giving the possibility to compute mean values with quantile-based confidence intervals. The mean values across sample sizes can be plotted and indices of different networks can be visually compared. See examples below.

Below is an animation of the sampling method (one iteration). A detailed explanation of the method can be found here.

Installation

You can install bootstrapnet from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("valentinitnelav/bootstrapnet")