Number of geometric bridges to use.

Number of proposals before any MCMC sampling is done. It typically is set to a fairly large number.

Number of proposals between sampled statistics.

Number of network statistics, randomly drawn from a given distribution on the set of all networks, returned by the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm.

The obs versions of these arguments are for the unobserved data simulation algorithm.

Specifies the proposal distribution used in the MCMC Metropolis-Hastings algorithm. Possible choices depending on selected reference and constraints arguments of the ergm() function, but often include "TNT" and "random", and the "default" is to use the one with the highest priority available.

The TNT (tie / no tie) option puts roughly equal weight on selecting a dyad with or without a tie as a candidate for toggling, whereas the random option puts equal weight on all possible dyads, though the interpretation of random may change according to the constraints in place. When no constraints are in place, the default is TNT, which appears to improve Markov chain mixing particularly for networks with a low edge density, as is typical of many realistic social networks.

An alternative, direct way of specifying additional arguments to proposal.

Maximum number of edges expected in network.

Names of packages in which to look for change statistic functions in addition to those autodetected. This argument should not be needed outside of very strange setups.

A list of additional arguments to be passed to term initializers. It can also be set globally via option(ergm.term=list(...)).

Seed value (integer) for the random number generator. See set.seed.

Number of threads in which to run the sampling. Defaults to 0 (no parallelism). See the entry on parallel processing for details and troubleshooting.

API to use for parallel processing. Supported values are "MPI" and "PSOCK". Defaults to using the parallel package with PSOCK clusters. See ergm-parallel

Logical: If TRUE, check that the version of ergm running on the slave nodes is the same as that running on the master node.