Covariates-Adjusted Mixed-Membership Estimation: A Novel Network Model with Optimal Guarantees

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Fan, Jianqing, Ge, Jiawei, Hou, Jikai
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Fan, Jianqing
Ge, Jiawei
Hou, Jikai
author_facet Fan, Jianqing
Ge, Jiawei
Hou, Jikai
contents This paper addresses the problem of mixed-membership estimation in networks, where the goal is to efficiently estimate the latent mixed-membership structure from the observed network. Recognizing the widespread availability and valuable information carried by node covariates, we propose a novel network model that incorporates both community information, as represented by the Degree-Corrected Mixed Membership (DCMM) model, and node covariate similarities to determine connections. We investigate the regularized maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) for this model and demonstrate that our approach achieves optimal estimation accuracy for both the similarity matrix and the mixed-membership, in terms of both the Frobenius norm and the entrywise loss. Since directly analyzing the original convex optimization problem is intractable, we employ nonconvex optimization to facilitate the analysis. A key contribution of our work is identifying a crucial assumption that bridges the gap between convex and nonconvex solutions, enabling the transfer of statistical guarantees from the nonconvex approach to its convex counterpart. Importantly, our analysis extends beyond the MLE loss and the mean squared error (MSE) used in matrix completion problems, generalizing to all the convex loss functions. Consequently, our analysis techniques extend to a broader set of applications, including ranking problems based on pairwise comparisons. Finally, simulation experiments validate our theoretical findings, and real-world data analyses confirm the practical relevance of our model.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_06671
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Covariates-Adjusted Mixed-Membership Estimation: A Novel Network Model with Optimal Guarantees
Fan, Jianqing
Ge, Jiawei
Hou, Jikai
Statistics Theory
Machine Learning
This paper addresses the problem of mixed-membership estimation in networks, where the goal is to efficiently estimate the latent mixed-membership structure from the observed network. Recognizing the widespread availability and valuable information carried by node covariates, we propose a novel network model that incorporates both community information, as represented by the Degree-Corrected Mixed Membership (DCMM) model, and node covariate similarities to determine connections. We investigate the regularized maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) for this model and demonstrate that our approach achieves optimal estimation accuracy for both the similarity matrix and the mixed-membership, in terms of both the Frobenius norm and the entrywise loss. Since directly analyzing the original convex optimization problem is intractable, we employ nonconvex optimization to facilitate the analysis. A key contribution of our work is identifying a crucial assumption that bridges the gap between convex and nonconvex solutions, enabling the transfer of statistical guarantees from the nonconvex approach to its convex counterpart. Importantly, our analysis extends beyond the MLE loss and the mean squared error (MSE) used in matrix completion problems, generalizing to all the convex loss functions. Consequently, our analysis techniques extend to a broader set of applications, including ranking problems based on pairwise comparisons. Finally, simulation experiments validate our theoretical findings, and real-world data analyses confirm the practical relevance of our model.
title Covariates-Adjusted Mixed-Membership Estimation: A Novel Network Model with Optimal Guarantees
topic Statistics Theory
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.06671