Mixed Membership Estimation for Social Networks

DOI10.48550/ARXIV.1708.07852MaRDI QIDQ144810zbMATH OpenFDO

Authors Jiashun Jin, Zheng Tracy Ke, Shengming Luo, Jiashun Jin, Zheng Tracy Ke, Shengming Luo

Publication date 25 August 2017

Published in Journal of Econometrics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.07852

zbMATH Keywords

citee networkcoauthorship networkcommunitiesnode embeddingpolitical blogsSCOREsimplexspectral clusteringtrade network

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Statistics (62-XX) Classification and discrimination; cluster analysis (statistical aspects) (62H30) Applications of statistics to social sciences (62P25) Game theory, economics, finance, and other social and behavioral sciences (91-XX) Clustering in the social and behavioral sciences (91C20)

Abstract: In economics and social science, network data are regularly observed, and a thorough understanding of the network community structure facilitates the comprehension of economic patterns and activities. Consider an undirected network with $n$ nodes and $K$ communities. We model the network using the Degree-Corrected Mixed-Membership (DCMM) model, where for each node $i$, there exists a membership vector $p{i}_i=(p{i}_i(1),p{i}_i(2),ldots,p{i}_i(K){)}^{\prime }$, where $p{i}_i(k)$ is the weight that node $i$ puts in community $k$, $1leqkleqK$. In comparison to the well-known stochastic block model (SBM), the DCMM permits both severe degree heterogeneity and mixed memberships, making it considerably more realistic and general. We present an efficient approach, Mixed-SCORE, for estimating the mixed membership vectors of all nodes and the other DCMM parameters. This approach is inspired by the discovery of a delicate simplex structure in the spectral domain. We derive explicit error rates for the Mixed-SCORE algorithm and demonstrate that it is rate-optimal over a broad parameter space. Our findings provide a novel statistical tool for network community analysis, which can be used to understand network formations, extract nodal features, identify unobserved covariates in dyadic regressions, and estimate peer effects. We applied Mixed-SCORE to a political blog network, two trade networks, a co-authorship network, and a citee network, and obtained interpretable results.

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