Displaying strength of ties in a network with nwcommands

[Dougie Jones]

I am creating a network with the package nwcommands. I'm using data in edgelist format from which I create my network, and the data looks as follows:

. list

      +---------------------+
      | from             to |
      |---------------------|
   1. |     3240       3240 |
   2. |      420       6711 |
   3. |     8740       8740 |
   4. |     8740       8740 |
   5. |     4540       8710 |
      |---------------------|
   6. |     4540       4540 |
   7. |     8710       8710 |
   8. |     8910       8910 |
   9. |     5740       5740 |
  10. |     7020       7020 |
      |---------------------|
  11. |     7020       6550 |
  12. |     7540        420 |
  13. |     2840       2840 |
  14. |     2840       2840 |
  15. |     2840       2840 |
      |---------------------|
  16. |     2840       2840 |
  17. |     2840       2840 |
  18. |     5840       5840 |
  19. |     8910       8910 |
  20. |     5240       5240 |
      |---------------------|

Creating an adjacency matrix from above data has been successful, but when I do that I obviously lose information on how frequent each connection has been made/used in the network. What I want to do is visualize that information; by making the edges in the network obvious if a certain connection has been used often. However, I'm not sure how I would extract that information from my data elegantly. Furthermore, to my knowledge there is no ready-made functionality within the nwcommands package that does this for me.

[Dougie Jones]

Does no one have any experience with this? Using other packages is also fine.

[Mike Lacy]

The data you list does not appear to define a network: If your variables are ids for nodes, it seems strange to me most of the edges are self-self. Some explanation here might help, as would checking out the material on -dataex- in the StataList FAQ, which explains how to make data conveniently available so that people can help you. Another thing that puzzles me here is that I don't see anything in your example data that represents the magnitude ("value") of the network tie. I believe that -nwcommands- does allow so-called "valued" networks, and has means to plot networks so as to visually represent the strength of ties. Under the "visualizartion" section of the "topical" section of -help nwcommands-, there appears to be some relevant material.

[Dougie Jones]

The data does define a network and indeed most are self-self so those would not be part of the network, as it does not represent a tie between two nodes. You're correct that the value or strength of the ties is not explicitly in the data, but I am hoping that the frequency that node A connects with node B can be somehow counted by the package as the strength of the tie. Mind you, the above data is only a very small portion of the total data.