When studying social behaviour, it can be important to determine whether the behaviour being recorded is actually driven by the social preferences of individuals. Many studies of animal social networks therefore attempt to disentangle social preferences from spatial preferences or restrictions. As such, there are a large number of techniques with which to test whether results from network analysis can be explained by random interactions, or interactions driven by similarities in space use. Selecting which of these methods to use will require determining to what extent space might influence social structure. Here we present a simple method (Social Spatial Community Assignment Test) to quantify the similarity between social and spatial group structure. We then apply this method to both simulated and empirical data of social interactions to demonstrate that it can successfully tease apart social and spatial explanations for groups. We first show that it can resolve the relative importance of space and social preferences in three simulated datasets in which interaction patterns are driven purely by space use, purely by social preferences or a mixture of the two. We then apply it to empirical data from a long-term study of free-ranging house mice. We find that while social structure is similar to spatial structure, there is still evidence for individuals possessing social preferences, with the importance of these preferences fluctuating between seasons. Our method provides a robust way of assessing the overlap between spatial and social structure, which will be invaluable to researchers when investigating the underlying drivers of social structure in wild populations.

中文翻译：

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量化空间对社会群体结构的影响

在研究社会行为时，确定记录的行为是否实际上受个人的社会偏好驱动可能很重要。因此，对动物社交网络的许多研究都试图将社交偏好与空间偏好或限制区分开。因此，有大量的技术可以用来测试网络分析的结果是否可以通过随机相互作用或空间使用相似性驱动的相互作用来解释。选择使用哪种方法将需要确定空间可能在多大程度上影响社会结构。在这里，我们提出了一种简单的方法（社会空间社区分配测验）来量化社会和空间群体结构之间的相似性。然后，我们将这种方法应用于社交互动的模拟数据和经验数据，以证明该方法可以成功地逗弄群体的社会和空间解释。我们首先表明，它可以解决三个模拟数据集中空间和社会偏好的相对重要性，在这些数据集中交互模式完全由空间使用，社会偏好或二者的混合驱动。然后，我们将其应用于来自自由放养的家鼠的长期研究的经验数据。我们发现，尽管社会结构类似于空间结构，但仍有证据表明个人具有社会偏好，这些偏好的重要性在不同季节之间波动。我们的方法为评估空间和社会结构之间的重叠提供了一种可靠的方法，