Measuring preferential attachment in growing networks with missing-timelines using Markov chain Monte Carlo

Preferential attachment is widely recognised as the principal driving force behind the evolution of many growing networks, and measuring the extent to which it occurs during the growth of a network is important for explaining its overall structure. Conventional methods require that the timeline of a growing network is known, that is, the order in which the nodes of the network appeared in time is available. But growing network datasets are commonly accompanied by missing-timelines, in which instance the order of the nodes in time cannot be readily ascertained from the data. To address this shortcoming, we propose a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm for measuring preferential attachment in growing networks with missing-timelines. Key to our approach is that any growing network model gives rise to a probability distribution over the space of networks. This enables a growing network model to be fitted to a growing network dataset with missing-timeline, allowing not only for the prevalence of preferential attachment to be estimated as a model parameter, but the timeline also. Parameter estimation is achieved by implementing a novel Metropolis–Hastings sampling scheme for updating both the preferential attachment parameter and timeline. A simulation study demonstrates that our method accurately measures the occurrence of preferential attachment in networks generated according to the underlying model. What is more, our approach is illustrated on a small sub-network of the United States patent citation network. Since the timeline for this example is in fact known, we are able to validate our approach against the conventional methods, showing that they give mutually consistent estimates.