Optimal Network Membership Estimation under Severe Degree Heterogeneity

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Ke, Zheng Tracy; Wang, Jingming
• 署名单位: Harvard University; University of Virginia
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN STATISTICAL ASSOCIATION
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0162-1459
• DOI: 10.1080/01621459.2024.2388903
• 发表日期: 2025
• 页码: 948-962
• 关键词: eigenvectors; selection

摘要

Real networks often have severe degree heterogeneity, with maximum, average, and minimum node degrees differing significantly. This article examines the impact of degree heterogeneity on statistical limits of network data analysis. Introducing the heterogeneity distribution (HD) under a degree-corrected mixed membership model, we show that the optimal rate of mixed membership estimation is an explicit functional of the HD. This result confirms that severe degree heterogeneity decelerates the error rate, even when the overall sparsity remains unchanged. To obtain a rate-optimal method, we modify an existing spectral algorithm, Mixed-SCORE, by adding a pre-PCA normalization step. This step normalizes the adjacency matrix by a diagonal matrix consisting of the bth power of node degrees, for some b is an element of R . We discover that b = 1/2 is universally favorable. The resulting spectral algorithm is rate-optimal for networks with arbitrary degree heterogeneity. A technical component in our proofs is entry-wise eigenvector analysis of the normalized graph Laplacian. Supplementary materials for this article are available online, including a standardized description of the materials available for reproducing the work.