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Random Graph Matching in Geometric Models: the Case of Complete Graphs
Proceedings of Thirty Fifth Conference on Learning Theory, PMLR 178:3441-3488, 2022.
Abstract
This paper studies the problem of matching two complete graphs with edge weights correlated through latent geometries, extending a recent line of research on random graph matching with independent edge weights to geometric models. Specifically, given a random permutation π∗ on [n] and n iid pairs of correlated Gaussian vectors {Xπ∗(i),Yi} in \realsd with noise parameter σ, the edge weights are given by Aij=κ(Xi,Xj) and Bij=κ(Yi,Yj) for some link function κ. The goal is to recover the hidden vertex correspondence π∗ based on the observation of A and B. We focus on the dot-product model with κ(x,y)=⟨x,y⟩ and Euclidean distance model with κ(x,y)=‖, in the low-dimensional regime of d=o(\log n) wherein the underlying geometric structures are most evident. We derive an approximate maximum likelihood estimator, which provably achieves, with high probability, perfect recovery of \pi^* when \sigma=o(n^{-2/d}) and almost perfect recovery with a vanishing fraction of errors when \sigma=o(n^{-1/d}). Furthermore, these conditions are shown to be information-theoretically optimal even when the latent coordinates \{X_i\} and \{Y_i\} are observed, complementing the recent results of Dai et al. (2019) and Kunisky and Niles-Weed (2022) in geometric models of the planted bipartite matching problem. As a side discovery, we show that the celebrated spectral algorithm of Umeyama (1988) emerges as a further approximation to the maximum likelihood in the geometric model.