2016/10/30 by Sandipan Roy, Yves F. Atchadé, Yves Atchadé +4 · 1 citation
Computer Science · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Algorithm #Artificial intelligence #Bayesian Methods and Mixture Models #Complex Network Analysis Techniques #Computation (stat.CO) #Computer science #Covariate #Data mining #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Inference #Key (lock) #Machine learning #Methodology (stat.ME) #Node (physics) #Parallelizable manifold #Scalability #Statistical Methods and Inference #stat.CO #stat.ME
paper · pdf · open access · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1610.09724
published in arXiv (Cornell University) (Cornell University) · 28 pages, 4 figures
openalex publication_date 2016/10/30 · arxiv created 2018/08/07 · arxiv updated 2018/08/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We consider a stochastic blockmodel equipped with node covariate information, that is helpful in analyzing social network data. The key objective is to obtain maximum likelihood estimates of the model parameters. For this task, we devise a fast, scalable Monte Carlo EM type algorithm based on case-control approximation of the log-likelihood coupled with a subsampling approach. A key feature of the proposed algorithm is its parallelizability, by processing portions of the data on several cores, while leveraging communication of key statistics across the cores during each iteration of the algorithm. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated on synthetic data sets and compared with competing methods for blockmodel parameter estimation. We also illustrate the model on data from a Facebook derived social network enhanced with node covariate information.