Search

The subgraph-subgraph matching problem is, given a pair of graphs and a positive integer $K$, to find $K$ vertices in the first graph, $K$ vertices in the second graph, and a bijection between them, so as to minimize the number of adjacency disagreements across the bijection; it is ``seeded" if some of this bijection is fixed. The problem is intractable, and we present the ssSGM algorithm, which uses Frank-Wolfe methodology to efficiently find an approximate solution. Then, in the context of a generalized correlated random Bernoulli graph model, in which the pair of graphs naturally have a core of $K$ matched pairs of vertices, we provide and prove mild conditions for the subgraph-subgraph matching problem solution to almost always be the correct $K$ matched pairs of vertices., Comment: 27 pages, 16 figures

The alignment strength of a graph matching is a quantity that gives the practitioner a measure of the correlation of the two graphs, and it can also give the practitioner a sense for whether the graph matching algorithm found the true matching. Unfortunately, when a graph matching algorithm fails to find the truth because of weak signal, there may be "phantom alignment strength" from meaningless matchings that, by random noise, have fewer disagreements than average (sometimes substantially fewer); this alignment strength may give the misleading appearance of significance. A practitioner needs to know what level of alignment strength may be phantom alignment strength and what level indicates that the graph matching algorithm obtained the true matching and is a meaningful measure of the graph correlation. The {\it Phantom Alignment Strength Conjecture} introduced here provides a principled and practical means to approach this issue. We provide empirical evidence for the conjecture, and explore its consequences.

Inference on vertex-aligned graphs is of wide theoretical and practical importance.There are, however, few flexible and tractable statistical models for correlated graphs, and even fewer comprehensive approaches to parametric inference on data arising from such graphs. In this paper, we consider the correlated Bernoulli random graph model (allowing different Bernoulli coefficients and edge correlations for different pairs of vertices), and we introduce a new variance-reducing technique -- called \emph{balancing} -- that can refine estimators for model parameters. Specifically, we construct a disagreement statistic and show that it is complete and sufficient; balancing can be interpreted as Rao-Blackwellization with this disagreement statistic. We show that for unbiased estimators of functions of model parameters, balancing generates uniformly minimum variance unbiased estimators (UMVUEs). However, even when unbiased estimators for model parameters do {\em not} exist -- which, as we prove, is the case with both the heterogeneity correlation and the total correlation parameters -- balancing is still useful, and lowers mean squared error. In particular, we demonstrate how balancing can improve the efficiency of the alignment strength estimator for the total correlation, a parameter that plays a critical role in graph matchability and graph matching runtime complexity.

When two graphs have a correlated Bernoulli distribution, we prove that the alignment strength of their natural bijection strongly converges to a novel measure of graph correlation $\rho_T$ that neatly combines intergraph with intragraph distribution parameters. Within broad families of the random graph parameter settings, we illustrate that exact graph matching runtime and also matchability are both functions of $\rho_T$, with thresholding behavior starkly illustrated in matchability.

The random dot product graph (RDPG) is an independent-edge random graph that is analytically tractable and, simultaneously, either encompasses or can successfully approximate a wide range of random graphs, from relatively simple stochastic block models to complex latent position graphs. In this survey paper, we describe a comprehensive paradigm for statistical inference on random dot product graphs, a paradigm centered on spectral embeddings of adjacency and Laplacian matrices. We examine the analogues, in graph inference, of several canonical tenets of classical Euclidean inference: in particular, we summarize a body of existing results on the consistency and asymptotic normality of the adjacency and Laplacian spectral embeddings, and the role these spectral embeddings can play in the construction of single- and multi-sample hypothesis tests for graph data. We investigate several real-world applications, including community detection and classification in large social networks and the determination of functional and biologically relevant network properties from an exploratory data analysis of the Drosophila connectome. We outline requisite background and current open problems in spectral graph inference., Comment: An expository survey paper on a comprehensive paradigm for inference for random dot product graphs, centered on graph adjacency and Laplacian spectral embeddings. Paper outlines requisite background; summarizes theory, methodology, and applications from previous and ongoing work; and closes with a discussion of several open problems

Given a graph in which a few vertices are deemed interesting a priori, the vertex nomination task is to order the remaining vertices into a nomination list such that there is a concentration of interesting vertices at the top of the list. Previous work has yielded several approaches to this problem, with theoretical results in the setting where the graph is drawn from a stochastic block model (SBM), including a vertex nomination analogue of the Bayes optimal classifier. In this paper, we prove that maximum likelihood (ML)-based vertex nomination is consistent, in the sense that the performance of the ML-based scheme asymptotically matches that of the Bayes optimal scheme. We prove theorems of this form both when model parameters are known and unknown. Additionally, we introduce and prove consistency of a related, more scalable restricted-focus ML vertex nomination scheme. Finally, we incorporate vertex and edge features into ML-based vertex nomination and briefly explore the empirical effectiveness of this approach.

We present a parallelized bijective graph matching algorithm that leverages seeds and is designed to match very large graphs. Our algorithm combines spectral graph embedding with existing state-of-the-art seeded graph matching procedures. We justify our approach by proving that modestly correlated, large stochastic block model random graphs are correctly matched utilizing very few seeds through our divide-and-conquer procedure. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in matching very large graphs in simulated and real data examples, showing up to a factor of 8 improvement in runtime with minimal sacrifice in accuracy., Comment: 32 pages, 8 figures

Graph matching is an important problem in machine learning and pattern recognition. Herein, we present theoretical and practical results on the consistency of graph matching for estimating a latent alignment function between the vertex sets of two graphs, as well as subsequent algorithmic implications when the latent alignment is partially observed. In the correlated Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi graph setting, we prove that graph matching provides a strongly consistent estimate of the latent alignment in the presence of even modest correlation. We then investigate a tractable, restricted-focus version of graph matching, which is only concerned with adjacency involving vertices in a partial observation of the latent alignment; we prove that a logarithmic number of vertices whose alignment is known is sufficient for this restricted-focus version of graph matching to yield a strongly consistent estimate of the latent alignment of the remaining vertices. We show how Frank-Wolfe methodology for approximate graph matching, when there is a partially observed latent alignment, inherently incorporates this restricted focus graph matching. Lastly, we illustrate the relationship between seeded graph matching and restricted-focus graph matching by means of an illuminating example from human connectomics., Comment: 28 pages, 5 figures

Suppose that two large, multi-dimensional data sets are each noisy measurements of the same underlying random process, and principle components analysis is performed separately on the data sets to reduce their dimensionality. In some circumstances it may happen that the two lower-dimensional data sets have an inordinately large Procrustean fitting-error between them. The purpose of this manuscript is to quantify this "incommensurability phenomenon." In particular, under specified conditions, the square Procrustean fitting-error of the two normalized lower-dimensional data sets is (asymptotically) a convex combination (via a correlation parameter) of the Hausdorff distance between the projection subspaces and the maximum possible value of the square Procrustean fitting-error for normalized data. We show how this gives rise to the incommensurability phenomenon, and we employ illustrative simulations as well as a real data experiment to explore how the incommensurability phenomenon may have an appreciable impact.

Given two graphs, the graph matching problem is to align the two vertex sets so as to minimize the number of adjacency disagreements between the two graphs. The seeded graph matching problem is the graph matching problem when we are first given a partial alignment that we are tasked with completing. In this paper, we modify the state-of-the-art approximate graph matching algorithm "FAQ" of Vogelstein et al. (2015) to make it a fast approximate seeded graph matching algorithm, adapt its applicability to include graphs with differently sized vertex sets, and extend the algorithm so as to provide, for each individual vertex, a nomination list of likely matches. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm via simulation and real data experiments; indeed, knowledge of even a few seeds can be extremely effective when our seeded graph matching algorithm is used to recover a naturally existing alignment that is only partially observed., Comment: 24 pages, 10 figures

Cayley's formula states that there are $n^{n-2}$ spanning trees in the complete graph on $n$ vertices; it has been proved in more than a dozen different ways over its 150 year history. The complete graphs are a special case of threshold graphs, and using Merris' Theorem and the Matrix Tree Theorem, there is a strikingly simple formula for counting the number of spanning trees in a threshold graph on $n$ vertices; it is simply the product, over $i=2,3, ...,n-1$, of the number of vertices of degree at least $i$. In this manuscript, we provide a direct combinatorial proof for this formula which does not use the Matrix Tree Theorem; the proof is an extension of Joyal's proof for Cayley's formula. Then we apply this methodology to give a formula for the number of spanning trees in any difference graph., Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures

For random graphs distributed according to a stochastic block model, we consider the inferential task of partioning vertices into blocks using spectral techniques. Spectral partioning using the normalized Laplacian and the adjacency matrix have both been shown to be consistent as the number of vertices tend to infinity. Importantly, both procedures require that the number of blocks and the rank of the communication probability matrix are known, even as the rest of the parameters may be unknown. In this article, we prove that the (suitably modified) adjacency-spectral partitioning procedure, requiring only an upper bound on the rank of the communication probability matrix, is consistent. Indeed, this result demonstrates a robustness to model mis-specification; an overestimate of the rank may impose a moderate performance penalty, but the procedure is still consistent. Furthermore, we extend this procedure to the setting where adjacencies may have multiple modalities and we allow for either directed or undirected graphs., Comment: 26 pages, 2 figure

Quadratic assignment problems (QAPs) arise in a wide variety of domains, ranging from operations research to graph theory to computer vision to neuroscience. In the age of big data, graph valued data is becoming more prominent, and with it, a desire to run algorithms on ever larger graphs. Because QAP is NP-hard, exact algorithms are intractable. Approximate algorithms necessarily employ an accuracy/efficiency trade-off. We developed a fast approximate quadratic assignment algorithm (FAQ). FAQ finds a local optima in (worst case) time cubic in the number of vertices, similar to other approximate QAP algorithms. We demonstrate empirically that our algorithm is faster and achieves a lower objective value on over 80% of the suite of QAP benchmarks, compared with the previous state-of-the-art. Applying the algorithms to our motivating example, matching C. elegans connectomes (brain-graphs), we find that FAQ achieves the optimal performance in record time, whereas none of the others even find the optimum., Comment: 17 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables

We present a method to estimate block membership of nodes in a random graph generated by a stochastic blockmodel. We use an embedding procedure motivated by the random dot product graph model, a particular example of the latent position model. The embedding associates each node with a vector; these vectors are clustered via minimization of a square error criterion. We prove that this method is consistent for assigning nodes to blocks, as only a negligible number of nodes will be mis-assigned. We prove consistency of the method for directed and undirected graphs. The consistent block assignment makes possible consistent parameter estimation for a stochastic blockmodel. We extend the result in the setting where the number of blocks grows slowly with the number of nodes. Our method is also computationally feasible even for very large graphs. We compare our method to Laplacian spectral clustering through analysis of simulated data and a graph derived from Wikipedia documents., Comment: 21 pages