Abstract

Networks are fast becoming a primary object of interest in statistical data analysis, with important applications spanning the social, biological, and information sciences. A common aim across these fields is to test for and explain the presence of structure in network data. In this talk we show how characterizing the structural features of a network corresponds to estimating the parameters of various random network models, allowing us to obtain new results for likelihood-based inference and uncertainty quantification in this context. We discuss asymptotics for stochastic blockmodels with growing numbers of classes, the determination of confidence sets for network structure, and a more general point process modeling for network data taking the form of repeated interactions between senders and receivers, where we show consistency and asymptotic normality of partial-likelihood-based estimators related to the Cox proportional hazards model (arXiv:1201.5871, 1105.6245, 1011.4644, 1011.1703).