Counting Motifs with Graph Sampling
This work addresses the challenge of network inference from sampled data for researchers in statistics and network science, providing theoretical guarantees and practical estimators.
The paper tackles the problem of estimating motif counts in a parent graph using two sampling schemes, subgraph and neighborhood sampling, and derives optimal sampling ratios and estimators for achieving multiplicative error bounds, with neighborhood sampling shown to be more informative.
Applied researchers often construct a network from a random sample of nodes in order to infer properties of the parent network. Two of the most widely used sampling schemes are subgraph sampling, where we sample each vertex independently with probability $p$ and observe the subgraph induced by the sampled vertices, and neighborhood sampling, where we additionally observe the edges between the sampled vertices and their neighbors. In this paper, we study the problem of estimating the number of motifs as induced subgraphs under both models from a statistical perspective. We show that: for any connected $h$ on $k$ vertices, to estimate $s=\mathsf{s}(h,G)$, the number of copies of $h$ in the parent graph $G$ of maximum degree $d$, with a multiplicative error of $ε$, (a) For subgraph sampling, the optimal sampling ratio $p$ is $Θ_{k}(\max\{ (sε^2)^{-\frac{1}{k}}, \; \frac{d^{k-1}}{sε^{2}} \})$, achieved by Horvitz-Thompson type of estimators. (b) For neighborhood sampling, we propose a family of estimators, encompassing and outperforming the Horvitz-Thompson estimator and achieving the sampling ratio $O_{k}(\min\{ (\frac{d}{sε^2})^{\frac{1}{k-1}}, \; \sqrt{\frac{d^{k-2}}{sε^2}}\})$. This is shown to be optimal for all motifs with at most $4$ vertices and cliques of all sizes. The matching minimax lower bounds are established using certain algebraic properties of subgraph counts. These results quantify how much more informative neighborhood sampling is than subgraph sampling, as empirically verified by experiments on both synthetic and real-world data. We also address the issue of adaptation to the unknown maximum degree, and study specific problems for parent graphs with additional structures, e.g., trees or planar graphs.