Benito, Rosa Maria; Cherifi, Chantal; Cherifi, Hocine; Moro, Esteban; Rocha, Luis M.
(Ed.)
To characterize the “average” of a set of graphs, one can compute the sample Fr ́echet mean. We prove the following result: if we use the Hamming distance to compute distances between graphs, then the Fr ́echet mean of an ensemble of inhomogeneous random graphs is obtained by thresholding the expected adjacency matrix: an edge exists between the vertices i and j in the Fr ́echet mean graph if and only if the corresponding entry of the expected adjacency matrix is greater than 1/2. We prove that the result also holds for the sample Fr ́echet mean when the expected adjacency matrix is replaced with the sample mean adjacency matrix. This novel theoretical result has some significant practical consequences; for instance, the Fr ́echet mean of an ensemble of sparse inhomogeneous random graphs is the empty graph.
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