Graph space: using both geometric and probabilistic structure to evaluate statistical graph models

Abstract

Statistical graph models aim at modeling graphs as random realization among a set of possible graphs. One issue is to evaluate whether or not a graph is likely to have been generated by one particular model. In this paper we introduce the edit distance expected value (EDEV) and compare it with other methods such as entropy and distance to the barycenter. We show that contrary to them, EDEV is able to distinguish between graphs that have a typical structure with respect to a model, and those that do not. Finally we introduce a statistical hypothesis testing methodology based on this distance to evaluate the relevance of a candidate model with respect to an observed graph.