Higher-Order Correct Multiplier Bootstraps for Count Functionals of Networks

Subgraph counts play a central role in both graph limit theory and network data analysis. In recent years, substantial progress has been made in the area of uncertainty quantification for these functionals; several procedures are now known to be consistent for the problem. In this paper, we propose a new class of multiplier bootstraps for count functionals. We show that a bootstrap procedure with a multiplicative weights exhibits higher-order correctness under appropriate sparsity conditions. Since this bootstrap is computationally expensive, we propose linear and quadratic approximations to the multiplier bootstrap, which correspond to the first and second-order Hayek projections of an approximating U-statistic, respectively. We show that the quadratic bootstrap procedure achieves higher-order correctness under analogous conditions to the multiplicative bootstrap while having much better computational properties. We complement our theoretical results with a simulation study and verify that our procedure offers state-of-the-art performance for several functionals.

On the Theoretical Properties of the Network Jackknife

We study the properties of a leave-node-out jackknife procedure for network data. Under the sparse graphon model, we prove an Efron-Stein-type inequality, showing that the network jackknife leads to conservative estimates of the variance (in expectation) for any network functional that is invariant to node permutation. For a general class of count functionals, we also establish consistency of the network jackknife. We complement our theoretical analysis with a range of simulated and real-data examples and show that the network jackknife offers competitive performance in cases where other resampling methods are known to be valid. In fact, for several network statistics, we see that the jackknife provides more accurate inferences compared to related methods such as subsampling.