Likelihood-based assessment of dynamic networks

Abstract

This paper deals with the problem of assessing probabilistic models that represent the evolution of a target graph. Such models have long been a topic of interest for a number of networks, especially communications networks. The solution developed in this paper gives a rigorous way to calculate the likelihood of the observed graph evolution having arisen from a wide variety of hypothesized models encompassing many already present in the literature. The framework is shown to recover parameters from artificial data and is tested on real data sets from Facebook and from emails from the company Enron.