Network histograms and universality of blockmodel approximation

• Published in: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS Vol. 111; no. 41; pp. 14722 - 14727
• Main Authors: Olhede, Sofia C., Wolfe, Patrick J.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States National Academy of Sciences 14.10.2014; National Acad Sciences
• Subjects: Adjacency matrix; Approximation; automation; Bandwidths; Blogs; Community structure; Data analysis; data collection; Datasets; Estimators; Friendship; Histograms; Oracles; Physical Sciences; Social networks; Stochastic models; sparse networks; nonparametric statistics; community detection; graphons; graph limits

In this paper we introduce the network histogram, a statistical summary of network interactions to be used as a tool for exploratory data analysis. A network histogram is obtained by fitting a stochastic blockmodel to a single observation of a network dataset. Blocks of edges play the role of histog...