Change Point Detection for Dynamic Graphs and Dynamic Valued Networks Modeling
We first consider the change point detection problem for dynamic graphs using the Separable Temporal Exponential-family Random Graph Model (STERGM). The STERGM that utilizes network statistics to represent the network structures is a flexible model to fit dynamic graphs. We propose a new estimator derived from the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) and Group Fused Lasso to simultaneously detect multiple time points, where the parameters of a time-heterogeneous STERGM have changed.
Then we study the change point detection problem for dynamic graphs under a generative framework. The proposed model consists of learnable prior distributions for graph-level representations and of a decoder that can generate dynamic graphs from the low-dimensional representations. The informative prior distributions in the latent spaces are learned from the observed graphs as empirical Bayes, and the expressive power of a generative model is exploited to assist change point detection.
Furthermore, we consider an exponential-family model to fit dynamic valued networks, as relations by nature often have degree of strength. To facilitate the modeling of dyad value increment and decrement, a Partially Separable Temporal Exponential-family Random Graph Model is proposed. The parameter learning algorithms approximate the maximum likelihood, by drawing Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) samples conditioning on the valued network from the previous time step.
Throughout the dissertation, we use both simulated and real-world data to evaluate the methodology and the learning algorithms. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed frameworks.

