Seminar by Mr.Christophe Ambroise

Date and time

September 27 , 2012 (Thu)　16:00-17:00

Place

D312A ,The Institute of Statistical Mathematics

Speaker

Christophe Ambroise (Laboratoire Statistique et Génome, CNRS)

Title

New consistent and asymptotically normal parameter estimates for random-graph mixture models

Abstract

Random-graph mixture models are very popular for modelling real data networks. Parameter estimation procedures usually rely on variational approximations, either combined with the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm or with Bayesian approaches.
Despite good results on synthetic data, the validity of the variational approximation is, however, not established. Moreover, these variational approaches aim at approximating the maximum likelihood or the maximum a posteriori estimators, whose behavior in an asymptotic framework (as the sample size increases to infinity) remains unknown for these models.
In this work, we show that, in many different affiliation contexts (for binary or weighted graphs), parameter estimators based either on moment equations or on the maximization of some composite likelihood are strongly consistent and convergent in n square root, when the number n of nodes increases to infinity.
As a consequence, our result establishes that the overall structure of an affiliation model can be (asymptotically) caught by the description of the network in terms of its number of triads (order 3 structures) and edges (order 2 structures). Moreover, these parameter estimates are either explicit (as for the moment estimators) or may be approximated by using a simple EM algorithm, whose convergence properties are known. We illustrate the efficiency of our method on simulated data and compare its performances with other existing procedures. A data set of cross-citations among economics journals is also analyzed.