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DERGMs: Degeneracy-restricted exponential family random graph models

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 March 2022

Vishesh Karwa ,
Sonja Petrović Open the ORCID record for Sonja Petrović [Opens in a new window]  and
Denis Bajić
Vishesh Karwa
Affiliation:
Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA
Sonja Petrović*
Affiliation:
Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL 60616, USA
Denis Bajić
Affiliation:
Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL 60616, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Email: sonja.petrovic@iit.edu
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Abstract

Exponential random graph models, or ERGMs, are a flexible and general class of models for modeling dependent data. While the early literature has shown them to be powerful in capturing many network features of interest, recent work highlights difficulties related to the models’ ill behavior, such as most of the probability mass being concentrated on a very small subset of the parameter space. This behavior limits both the applicability of an ERGM as a model for real data and inference and parameter estimation via the usual Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms. To address this problem, we propose a new exponential family of models for random graphs that build on the standard ERGM framework. Specifically, we solve the problem of computational intractability and “degenerate” model behavior by an interpretable support restriction. We introduce a new parameter based on the graph-theoretic notion of degeneracy, a measure of sparsity whose value is commonly low in real-world networks. The new model family is supported on the sample space of graphs with bounded degeneracy and is called degeneracy-restricted ERGMs, or DERGMs for short. Since DERGMs generalize ERGMs—the latter is obtained from the former by setting the degeneracy parameter to be maximal—they inherit good theoretical properties, while at the same time place their mass more uniformly over realistic graphs. The support restriction allows the use of new (and fast) Monte Carlo methods for inference, thus making the models scalable and computationally tractable. We study various theoretical properties of DERGMs and illustrate how the support restriction improves the model behavior. We also present a fast Monte Carlo algorithm for parameter estimation that avoids many issues faced by Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms used for inference in ERGMs.

Keywords

networkERGMdegeneracystabilitysufficiency
Type
Research Article
Information
Network Science , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , March 2022 , pp. 82 - 110
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

†

Karwa was partially supported by NSF TRIPODS+X grant number 1947919.

‡

SP is partially supported by the Simons Foundation’s the Collaboration Grant forMathematicians 854770. This work was initially supported by U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research Grant #FA9550-14-1-0141 to Illinois Tech. A small subset of the simulations for this work were completed on Illinois Tech’s Karlin cluster.

Action Editor: Stanley Wasserman

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