Optimal Network Membership Estimation under Severe Degree Heterogeneity

Zheng Tracy Ke and Jingming Wang

Journal of the American Statistical Association, 2025, vol. 120, issue 550, 948-962

Abstract: 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∈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.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/01621459.2024.2388903

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