ABSTRACT
This chapter covers network stability, comparison, and replicability. No matter how sophisticated or appropriate a network estimation method is, the estimated network results in point estimates, and does not provide information about uncertainty in these estimates due to sampling variation. To this end, any network analyses should be supplemented with analyses on the precision of parameter estimates, introduced here. Further, the chapter describes statistical methods to compare network structures across networks estimated in different samples, which can provide information on how well network models replicate. After working through this chapter, the reader will be able to perform bootstraps and permutation tests using the R-packages bootnet and NetworkComparisonTest, and understand which differences in network structure are to be expected, given certain levels of sampling variation.
