An official website of the United States government
Determinantal point processes (DPPs) have recently become popular tools for modeling the phenomenon of negative dependence, or repulsion, in data. However, our understanding of an analogue of a classical parametric statistical theory is rather limited for this class of models. In this work, we investigate a parametric family of Gaussian DPPs with a clearly interpretable effect of parametric modulation on the observed points. We show that parameter modulation impacts the observed points by introducing directionality in their repulsion structure, and the principal directions correspond to the directions of maximal (i.e., the most long-ranged) dependency. This model readily yields a viable alternative to principal component analysis (PCA) as a dimension reduction tool that favors directions along which the data are most spread out. This methodological contribution is complemented by a statistical analysis of a spiked model similar to that employed for covariance matrices as a framework to study PCA. These theoretical investigations unveil intriguing questions for further examination in random matrix theory, stochastic geometry, and related topics.
more »
« less
Fractal Gaussian Networks: A sparse random graph model based on Gaussian Multiplicative Chaos
We propose a novel stochastic network model, called Fractal Gaussian Network (FGN), that embodies well-defined and analytically tractable fractal structures. Such fractal structures have been empirically observed in diverse applications. FGNs interpolate continuously between the popular purely random geometric graphs (a.k.a. the Poisson Boolean network), and random graphs with increasingly fractal behavior. In fact, they form a parametric family of sparse random geometric graphs that are parametrised by a fractality parameter đ which governs the strength of the fractal structure. FGNs are driven by the latent spatial geometry of Gaussian Multiplicative Chaos (GMC), a canonical model of fractality in its own right. We explore the natural question of detecting the presence of fractality and the problem of parameter estimation based on observed network data. Finally, we explore fractality in community structures by unveiling a natural stochastic block model in the setting of FGNs.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1934568
- PAR ID:
- 10349092
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of Machine Learning Research
- Volume:
- 119
- ISSN:
- 2640-3498
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 3545-3555
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Quantifying the differences between networks is a challenging and ever-present problem in network science. In recent years, a multitude of diverse, ad hoc solutions to this problem have been introduced. Here, we propose that simple and well-understood ensembles of random networksâsuch as ErdĆsâRĂ©nyi graphs, random geometric graphs, WattsâStrogatz graphs, the configuration model and preferential attachment networksâare natural benchmarks for network comparison methods. Moreover, we show that the expected distance between two networks independently sampled from a generative model is a useful property that encapsulates many key features of that model. To illustrate our results, we calculate this within-ensemble graph distance and related quantities for classic network models (and several parameterizations thereof) using 20 distance measures commonly used to compare graphs. The within-ensemble graph distance provides a new framework for developers of graph distances to better understand their creations and for practitioners to better choose an appropriate tool for their particular task.more » « less
-
Summary For multivariate spatial Gaussian process models, customary specifications of cross-covariance functions do not exploit relational inter-variable graphs to ensure process-level conditional independence between the variables. This is undesirable, especially in highly multivariate settings, where popular cross-covariance functions, such as multivariate MatĂ©rn functions, suffer from a curse of dimensionality as the numbers of parameters and floating-point operations scale up in quadratic and cubic order, respectively, with the number of variables. We propose a class of multivariate graphical Gaussian processes using a general construction called stitching that crafts cross-covariance functions from graphs and ensures process-level conditional independence between variables. For the MatĂ©rn family of functions, stitching yields a multivariate Gaussian process whose univariate components are MatĂ©rn Gaussian processes, and which conforms to process-level conditional independence as specified by the graphical model. For highly multivariate settings and decomposable graphical models, stitching offers massive computational gains and parameter dimension reduction. We demonstrate the utility of the graphical MatĂ©rn Gaussian process to jointly model highly multivariate spatial data using simulation examples and an application to air-pollution modelling.more » « less
-
Given a sequence of possibly correlated randomly generated graphs, we address the problem of detecting changes on their underlying distribution. To this end, we will consider Random Dot Product Graphs (RDPGs), a simple yet rich family of random graphs that subsume Erdös-RĂ©nyi and Stochastic Block Model ensembles as particular cases. In RDPGs each node has an associated latent vector and inner products between these vectors dictate the edge existence probabilities. Previous works have mostly focused on the undirected and unweighted graph case, a gap we aim to close here. We first extend the RDPG model to accommodate directed and weighted graphs, a contribution whose interest transcends change-point detection (CPD). A statistic derived from the nodes' estimated latent vectors (i.e., embeddings) facilitates adoption of scalable geometric CPD techniques. The resulting algorithm yields interpretable results and facilitates pinpointing which (and when) nodes are acting differently. Numerical tests on simulated data as well as on a real dataset of graphs stemming from a Wi-Fi network corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed CPD method.more » « less
-
Representation learning over graph structured data has been mostly studied in static graph settings while efforts for modeling dynamic graphs are still scant. In this paper, we develop a novel hierarchical variational model that introduces additional latent random variables to jointly model the hidden states of a graph recurrent neural network (GRNN) to capture both topology and node attribute changes in dynamic graphs. We argue that the use of high-level latent random variables in this variational GRNN (VGRNN) can better capture potential variability observed in dynamic graphs as well as the uncertainty of node latent representation. With semi-implicit variational inference developed for this new VGRNN architecture (SI-VGRNN), we show that flexible non-Gaussian latent representations can further help dynamic graph analytic tasks. Our experiments with multiple real-world dynamic graph datasets demonstrate that SI-VGRNN and VGRNN consistently outperform the existing baseline and state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin in dynamic link prediction.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
