Probabilistic Foundations Of Statistical Network Analysis

Probabilistic Foundations of Statistical Network Analysis presents a fresh and insightful perspective on the fundamental tenets and major challenges of modern network analysis. Its lucid exposition provides necessary background for understanding the essential ideas behind exchangeable and dynamic network models, network sampling, and network statistics such as sparsity and power law, all of which play a central role in contemporary data science and machine learning applications. The book rewards readers with a clear and intuitive understanding of the subtle interplay between basic principles of statistical inference, empirical properties of network data, and technical concepts from probability theory. Its mathematically rigorous, yet non-technical, exposition makes the book accessible to professional data scientists, statisticians, and computer scientists as well as practitioners and researchers in substantive fields. Newcomers and non-quantitative researchers will find its conceptual approach invaluable for developing intuition about technical ideas from statistics and probability, while experts and graduate students will find the book a handy reference for a wide range of new topics, including edge exchangeability, relative exchangeability, graphon and graphex models, and graph-valued Levy process and rewiring models for dynamic networks. The author’s incisive commentary supplements these core concepts, challenging the reader to push beyond the current limitations of this emerging discipline. With an approachable exposition and more than 50 open research problems and exercises with solutions, this book is ideal for advanced undergraduate and graduate students interested in modern network analysis, data science, machine learning, and statistics. Harry Crane is Associate Professor and Co-Director of the Graduate Program in Statistics and Biostatistics and an Associate Member of the Graduate Faculty in Philosophy at Rutgers University. Professor Crane’s research interests cover a range of mathematical and applied topics in network science, probability theory, statistical inference, and mathematical logic. In addition to his technical work on edge and relational exchangeability, relative exchangeability, and graph-valued Markov processes, Prof. Crane’s methods have been applied to domain-specific cybersecurity and counterterrorism problems at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and RAND’s Project AIR FORCE.

Probabilistic Foundations of Statistical Network Analysis presents a fresh and insightful perspective on the fundamental tenets and major challenges of modern network analysis. Its lucid exposition provides necessary background for understanding the essential ideas behind exchangeable and dynamic network models, network sampling, and network statistics such as sparsity and power law, all of which play a central role in contemporary data science and machine learning applications. The book rewards readers with a clear and intuitive understanding of the subtle interplay between basic principles of statistical inference, empirical properties of network data, and technical concepts from probability theory. Its mathematically rigorous, yet non-technical, exposition makes the book accessible to professional data scientists, statisticians, and computer scientists as well as practitioners and researchers in substantive fields. Newcomers and non-quantitative researchers will find its conceptual approach invaluable for developing intuition about technical ideas from statistics and probability, while experts and graduate students will find the book a handy reference for a wide range of new topics, including edge exchangeability, relative exchangeability, graphon and graphex models, and graph-valued Levy process and rewiring models for dynamic networks. The author’s incisive commentary supplements these core concepts, challenging the reader to push beyond the current limitations of this emerging discipline. With an approachable exposition and more than 50 open research problems and exercises with solutions, this book is ideal for advanced undergraduate and graduate students interested in modern network analysis, data science, machine learning, and statistics. Harry Crane is Associate Professor and Co-Director of the Graduate Program in Statistics and Biostatistics and an Associate Member of the Graduate Faculty in Philosophy at Rutgers University. Professor Crane’s research interests cover a range of mathematical and applied topics in network science, probability theory, statistical inference, and mathematical logic. In addition to his technical work on edge and relational exchangeability, relative exchangeability, and graph-valued Markov processes, Prof. Crane’s methods have been applied to domain-specific cybersecurity and counterterrorism problems at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and RAND’s Project AIR FORCE.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the International Workshop on Statistical Network Analysis: Models, Issues, and New Directions held in Pittsburgh, PA, USA in June 2006 as associated event of the 23rd International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2006. It covers probabilistic methods for network analysis, paying special attention to model design and computational issues of learning and inference.

Networks are ubiquitous in science and have become a focal point for discussion in everyday life. Formal statistical models for the analysis of network data have emerged as a major topic of interest in diverse areas of study, and most of these involve a form of graphical representation. Probability models on graphs date back to 1959. Along with empirical studies in social psychology and sociology from the 1960s, these early works generated an active network community and a substantial literature in the 1970s. This effort moved into the statistical literature in the late 1970s and 1980s, and the past decade has seen a burgeoning network literature in statistical physics and computer science. The growth of the World Wide Web and the emergence of online networking communities such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, and a host of more specialized professional network communities has intensified interest in the study of networks and network data. Our goal in this review is to provide the reader with an entry point to this burgeoning literature. We begin with an overview of the historical development of statistical network modeling and then we introduce a number of examples that have been studied in the network literature. Our subsequent discussion focuses on a number of prominent static and dynamic network models and their interconnections. We emphasize formal model descriptions, and pay special attention to the interpretation of parameters and their estimation. We end with a description of some open problems and challenges for machine learning and statistics.

This volume consists of a collection of tutorial papers by leading experts on statistical and probabilistic aspects of chaos and networks, in particular neural networks. While written for the non-expert, they are intended to bring the reader up to the forefront of knowledge and research in the subject areas concerned. The papers, which contain extensive references to the literature, can separately or in various combinations serve as bases for short- or full-length courses, at graduate or more advanced levels. The papers are directed not only to mathematical statisticians but also to students and researchers in related fields of biology, engineering, geology, physics and probability.

This snapshot of the current frontier of statistics and network analysis focuses on the foundational topics of modeling, sampling, and design. Primarily for graduate students and researchers in statistics and closely related fields, emphasis is not only on what has been done, but on what remains to be done.

Displays the broad range of quantitative approaches to analysing ecological networks, providing clear examples and guidance for researchers.

The Statistical Analysis of Multivariate Failure Time Data: A Marginal Modeling Approach provides an innovative look at methods for the analysis of correlated failure times. The focus is on the use of marginal single and marginal double failure hazard rate estimators for the extraction of regression information. For example, in a context of randomized trial or cohort studies, the results go beyond that obtained by analyzing each failure time outcome in a univariate fashion. The book is addressed to researchers, practitioners, and graduate students, and can be used as a reference or as a graduate course text. Much of the literature on the analysis of censored correlated failure time data uses frailty or copula models to allow for residual dependencies among failure times, given covariates. In contrast, this book provides a detailed account of recently developed methods for the simultaneous estimation of marginal single and dual outcome hazard rate regression parameters, with emphasis on multiplicative (Cox) models. Illustrations are provided of the utility of these methods using Women’s Health Initiative randomized controlled trial data of menopausal hormones and of a low-fat dietary pattern intervention. As byproducts, these methods provide flexible semiparametric estimators of pairwise bivariate survivor functions at specified covariate histories, as well as semiparametric estimators of cross ratio and concordance functions given covariates. The presentation also describes how these innovative methods may extend to handle issues of dependent censorship, missing and mismeasured covariates, and joint modeling of failure times and covariates, setting the stage for additional theoretical and applied developments. This book extends and continues the style of the classic Statistical Analysis of Failure Time Data by Kalbfleisch and Prentice. Ross L. Prentice is Professor of Biostatistics at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and University of Washington in Seattle, Washington. He is the recipient of COPSS Presidents and Fisher awards, the AACR Epidemiology/Prevention and Team Science awards, and is a member of the National Academy of Medicine. Shanshan Zhao is a Principal Investigator at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.