Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have become a pivotal method in machine learning for modeling functions over graphs. Despite their widespread success across various applications, their statistical properties (e.g., consistency, convergence rates) remain ill-characterized. To begin addressing this knowledge gap, we consider networks for which the graph structure implies that neighboring nodes exhibit similar signals and provide statistical theory for the impact of convolution operators. Focusing on estimators based solely on neighborhood aggregation, we examine how two common convolutions—the original GCN and GraphSAGE convolutions—affect the learning error as a function of the neighborhood topology and the number of convolutional layers. We explicitly characterize the bias variance type trade-off incurred by GCNs as a function of the neighborhood size and identify specific graph topologies where convolution operators are less effective. Our theoretical findings are corroborated by synthetic experiments, and provide a start to a deeper quantitative understanding of convolutional effects in GCNs for offering rigorous guidelines for practitioners.

We study the problem of bivariate discrete or continuous probability density estimation under low-rank constraints. For discrete distributions, we assume that the two-dimensional array to estimate is a low-rank probability matrix. In the continuous case, we assume that the density with respect to the Lebesgue measure satisfies a generalized multi-view model, meaning that it is $\beta$-Hölder and can be decomposed as a sum of $K$ components, each of which is a product of one-dimensional functions. In both settings, we propose estimators that achieve, up to logarithmic factors, the minimax optimal convergence rates under such low-rank constraints. In the discrete case, the proposed estimator is adaptive to the rank $K$. In the continuous case, our estimator converges with the $L_1$ rate $\min((K/n)^{\beta/(2\beta+1)}, n^{-\beta/(2\beta+2)})$ up to logarithmic factors, and it is adaptive to the unknown support as well as to the smoothness $\beta$ and to the unknown number of separable components $K$. We present efficient algorithms to compute our estimators.

Variational methods are extremely popular in the analysis of network data. Statistical guarantees obtained for these methods typically provide asymptotic normality for the problem of estimation of global model parameters under the stochastic block model. In the present work, we consider the case of networks with missing links that is important in application and show that the variational approximation to the maximum likelihood estimator converges at the minimax rate. This provides the first minimax optimal and tractable estimator for the problem of parameter estimation for the stochastic block model with missing links. We complement our results with numerical studies of simulated and real networks, which confirm the advantages of this estimator over current methods.

Matrix completion aims to reconstruct a data matrix based on observations of a small number of its entries. Usually in matrix completion a single matrix is considered, which can be, for example, a rating matrix in recommendation system. However, in practical situations, data is often obtained from multiple sources which results in a collection of matrices rather than a single one. In this work, we consider the problem of collective matrix completion with multiple and heterogeneous matrices, which can be count, binary, continuous, etc. We first investigate the setting where, for each source, the matrix entries are sampled from an exponential family distribution. Then, we relax the assumption of exponential family distribution for the noise. In this setting, we do not assume any specific model for the observations. The estimation procedures are based on minimizing the sum of a goodness-of-fit term and the nuclear norm penalization of the whole collective matrix. We prove that the proposed estimators achieve fast rates of convergence under the two considered settings and we corroborate our results with numerical experiments.

Many applications of machine learning involve the analysis of large data frames -- matrices collecting heterogeneous measurements (binary, numerical, counts, etc.) across samples -- with missing values. Low-rank models, as studied by Udell et al. (2016), are popular in this framework for tasks such as visualization, clustering and missing value imputation. Yet, available methods with statistical guarantees and efficient optimization do not allow explicit modeling of main additive effects such as row and column, or covariate effects. In this paper, we introduce a low-rank interaction and sparse additive effects (LORIS) model which combines matrix regression on a dictionary and low-rank design, to estimate main effects and interactions simultaneously. We provide statistical guarantees in the form of upper bounds on the estimation error of both components. Then, we introduce a mixed coordinate gradient descent (MCGD) method which provably converges sub-linearly to an optimal solution and is computationally efficient for large scale data sets. We show on simulated and survey data that the method has a clear advantage over current practices.