Fitting Low-rank Models on Egocentrically Sampled Partial Networks

The statistical modeling of random networks has been widely used to uncover interaction mechanisms in complex systems and to predict unobserved links in real-world networks. In many applications, network connections are collected via egocentric sampling: a subset of nodes is sampled first, after which all links involving this subset are recorded; all other information is missing. Compared with the assumption of “uniformly missing at random”, egocentrically sampled partial networks require specially designed modeling strategies. Current statistical methods are either computationally infeasible or based on intuitive designs without theoretical justification. Here, we propose an approach to fit general low-rank models for egocentrically sampled networks, which include several popular network models. This method is based on graph spectral properties and is computationally efficient for large-scale networks. It results in consistent recovery of missing subnetworks due to egocentric sampling for sparse networks. To our knowledge, this method offers the first theoretical guarantee for egocentric partial network estimation in the scope of low-rank models. We evaluate the technique on several synthetic and real-world networks and show that it delivers competitive performance in link prediction tasks.