Convergence Rates of Ordering, Testing and Estimation Procedures for Graphons With Fast Boundary Decay Rates

Abstract

In latent-position random graph models (LPMs), latent vertex positions $U_{1},\ldots,U_{n}$ are sampled from some distribution on a latent space $\Omega$, then edges of an observed graph $G = ([n],E)$ are sampled with some probability $\mathbb{P}[(i,j) \in E ]=w(U_i,U_j)$ that depends on the unobserved latent positions. LPMs are ubiquitous in the statistical analysis of networks, offering models that have good empirical performance, strong theoretical guarantees, and tractable algorithms. The special case $\Omega = [0,1]$ is important, as it corresponds to graphs with temporal or preference-based structure. In this paper, we study three problems related to LPMs with latent space $[0,1]$: \textit{ordering} the vertices according to the latent positions, \textit{estimating} the generating graphon $w$, and \textit{testing} whether an observed graph $G$ could have come from an LPM with state space $[0,1]$. Our results on the ordering problem greatly generalize two observations of Janssen/Smith (2022): (i) for \textit{some} families of graphons, the best estimate of the ordering converges much faster than the usual statistical rate of $\frac{1}{\sqrt{n}}$, and (ii) this occurs even though, for the same families of graphons, the best estimate of the latent positions still occurs at the usual $\frac{1}{\sqrt{n}}$ rate. As a main consequence, we develop a computationally-efficient graphon-estimation algorithm and show that it has the same convergence rate as the non-explicit optimal algorithm of Gao et al (2015). We also derive and analyze a testing procedure.