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The $k$-core decomposition is a widely studied summary statistic that describes a graph's global connectivity structure. In this paper, we move beyond using $k$-core decomposition as a tool to summarize a graph and propose using $k$-core…

We develop a modular approach to Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling for unnormalized target densities. In this approach, Markov chains are constructed in parallel, each constrained to a subset of the target space. The Monte Carlo…

The configuration model is a sequence of random graphs constructed such that in the large network limit the degree distribution converges to a pre-specified probability distribution. The component structure of such random graphs can be…

Deriving Bayesian inference for exponential random graph models (ERGMs) is a challenging "doubly intractable" problem as the normalizing constants of the likelihood and posterior density are both intractable. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…

Inferring directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) from data via Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is computationally challenging in moderate-to-high dimensional settings because their discrete sampling space grows super-exponentially with the number…

In many domains, we are interested in analyzing the structure of the underlying distribution, e.g., whether one variable is a direct parent of the other. Bayesian model-selection attempts to find the MAP model and use its structure to…

Segmenting images of low quality or with missing data is a challenging problem. Integrating statistical prior information about the shapes to be segmented can improve the segmentation results significantly. Most shape-based segmentation…

A graph homomorphism is a map between two graphs that preserves adjacency relations. We consider the problem of sampling a random graph homomorphism from a graph into a large network. We propose two complementary MCMC algorithms for…

We present a sequential sampling methodology for weakly structural Markov laws, arising naturally in a Bayesian structure learning context for decomposable graphical models. As a key component of our suggested approach, we show that the…

Leaving posterior sensitivity concerns aside, non-identifiability of the parameters does not raise a difficulty for Bayesian inference as far as the posterior is proper, but multi-modality or flat regions of the posterior induced by the…

Many problems in the physical sciences, machine learning, and statistical inference necessitate sampling from a high-dimensional, multi-modal probability distribution. Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, the ubiquitous tool for this…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are simple and extremely powerful techniques to sample from almost arbitrary distributions. The flaw in practice is that it can take a large and/or unknown amount of time to converge to the…

Directed acyclic graphs are the basic representation of the structure underlying Bayesian networks, which represent multivariate probability distributions. In many practical applications, such as the reverse engineering of gene regulatory…

The Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) sampling algorithm exploits Hamiltonian dynamics to construct efficient Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), which has become increasingly popular in machine learning and statistics. Since HMC uses the gradient…

Community detection is a fundamental problem in network analysis, with applications in many diverse areas. The stochastic block model is a common tool for model-based community detection, and asymptotic tools for checking consistency of…

The literature in social network analysis has largely focused on methods and models which require complete network data; however there exist many networks which can only be studied via sampling methods due to the scale or complexity of the…

This paper presents how to use common random number (CRN) simulation to evaluate Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) convergence to stationarity. We provide an upper bound on the Wasserstein distance of a Markov chain to its stationary…

Markov chain Monte Calro methods (MCMC) are commonly used in Bayesian statistics. In the last twenty years, many results have been established for the calculation of the exact convergence rate of MCMC methods. We introduce another rate of…

This work considers the general task of estimating the sum of a bounded function over the edges of a graph, given neighborhood query access and where access to the entire network is prohibitively expensive. To estimate this sum, prior work…

We develop a novel Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method that exploits a hierarchy of models of increasing complexity to efficiently generate samples from an unnormalized target distribution. Broadly, the method rewrites the Multilevel…