Major package updates

We’re excited to announce the new release of the statnet suite of packages, which are rolling out to CRAN during June 10-30. The biggest changes are in the foundational stat packages: ergm and tergm. Both have been given major updates that extend functionality and provide dramatic improvements incomputational efficiency, especially for large sparse networks (1M nodes).

• The updates to ergm are reviewed in this ArXiv preprint.
• The updates to tergm will be reflected in the tergm workshop tutorial (available in time for Sunbelt), and a paper in due course.

Despite the magnitude of the changes, and the development of new user interfaces, the updates are almost entirely backwards compatible. That said, we will be deprecating some of the older functions (like stergm()) in the future, so it’s worth learning how to access this functionality using the new syntax.

• If you have questions about the new versions, the statnet_help list is still the place to ask them.
• To report a bug, the GitHub repositories are the place for that (they’re listed at statnet on github).
• If you want to thank someone, thank Pavel – he remains our lead developer and maintainer. It’s a crazy amount of work.