Asymptotic Normality of In- and Out-Degree Counts in a Preferential Attachment Model

Abstract

Preferential attachment in a directed scale-free graph is widely used to model the evolution of social networks. Statistical analyses of social networks often relies on node based data rather than conventional repeated sampling. For our directed edge model with preferential attachment, we prove asymptotic normality of node counts based on a martingale construction and a martingale central limit theorem. This helps justify estimation methods based on the statistics of node counts which have specified in-degree and out-degree.