The means of network analysis provided by the R environment

Abstract

The R open source software package is especially suitable for mathematical and statistical data
analysis. It is highly flexible and by the means of packages very customizable. The theory of graphs
provides practical solutions to very different problems of everyday life. Several efforts have been made
to develop packages in the R environment to implement the means of the graph theory, such as the
graph, igraph, networksis, netstat packages. In this paper a comparison of the aims of the different
packages is undertaken. Several packages provide exact descriptions of graphs, while others use
sequential importance sampling. The enrolment data of Kaposvár University from the year 2007
were processed by sequential importance sampling using the networksis package. We concluded that
the study programmes offered by the faculties of Kaposvár University do not compete with each
other. The analysis was done by separating the study programmes according to faculties. Further
analysis might be needed to examine all the programmes pooled together.