Inferring the causes of animal social network structure from time-series data

Behavioural ecologists aim to understand the causes of animal social structure. Connecting theoretical models of social structure with empirical observations remains, however, a formidable challenge. While most of the current statistical methods for animal social network analysis rely on data that are aggregated over time and summarised as one behavioural dimension (e.g., an adjacency-matrix), common behavioural sampling techniques (e.g., focal-animal sampling) produce data in continuous time, and involve different behaviours. Furthermore, empiricists in the field are generally interested in causal inference, but lack a framework to rigorously analyse focal-animal sampling data in light of transparent causal assumptions. As a consequence, common methods are often inappropriate, and can lead to wrong biological conclusions. Here, we introduce a causal Bayesian modelling framework to empirically study the causes of social network structure from focal-animal sampling data. We start by outlining a generative model that encodes how biological and measurement processes jointly produce social network data in continuous time; namely, as a temporal sequence of dyadic behavioural states (e.g., no body contact, social resting, grooming). Building upon the generative model, we develop a statistical model: a multilevel, multiplex Bayesian model that takes raw focal observations as input, and produces a posterior probability distribution for the generative parameters as output. After validating the statistical model’s performance with sparse data–common in real-world settings–we illustrate its application with an empirical data set collected in wild Assamese macaques. We notably showcase how researchers can compute probabilistic estimates for well-defined causal hypotheses about the drivers of social structure. With this work, we not only contribute novel theoretical and statistical tools to the field, but also illustrate a workflow that allows researchers to iteratively translate their domain expertise into a formal analytical strategy–bridging theoretical and empirical research in behavioural ecology.