[Rsiena-help] Longitudinal network data based on multiple networks with changing actor composition

[Mathias De Roeck]

Dear all

At the moment I'm learning to work with RSiena, but given the nature  
of my data I experience problems.

I have longitudinal network data (from 1965 to 2005, so 41 waves)  
about political, economic and military relations between countries (a  
total of 7 networks). Currently, the data is in edgelist format like  
for example:

Year  CountrySender   CountryReceiver  Relation
1965  AFG             USA               1

When there is no relation between two countries, there is no  
information in the datafiles (that means it is not coded as 0 or  
missing, but simply not present in the datasets). The world system is  
a network with changing actors, since countries are entering and  
leaving the system. Now I have some questions:

1. After checking the RSiena manual, it seems that I need to make an  
exogenous events file. Is it possible to name the actors in this file,  
so that I now that Afghanistan is Afghanistan and the US is the US?
2. Does the exogenous events file imply that I will incept the  
datasets within this broader dataframe?
3. Is there a way to directly read in the data, without splitting them  
up in different waves?

These are my questions. I would really appreciate any comments and  
suggestions.

Thanks in advance

Mathias De Roeck
Junior Researcher
Center for Social Theory
Ghent University