Relational Event Model

The relational event model (REM), introduced by Carter Butts in 2008, analyzes streams of time-stamped interactions — emails, radio calls, messages, citations — as a continuous-time event-history process. Rather than treating a network as a static set of ties, it models the instantaneous rate at which any sender directs an action at any receiver as a function of the history of past events, letting researchers test how prior interaction shapes future interaction.