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Effective memory structures for relational data within R must be capable of representing a wide range of data while keeping overhead to a minimum. The network package provides an class which may be used for encoding complex relational structures composed a vertex set together with any combination of undirected/directed, valued/unvalued, dyadic/hyper, and single/multiple edges; storage requirements are on the order of the number of edges involved. Some simple constructor, interface, and visualization functions are provided, as well as a set of operators to facilitate employment by end users. The package also supports a C-language API, which allows developers to work directly with network objects within backend code.
Carter T. Butts (Tue,) studied this question.