Title: Efficient Synthetic Network Generation via Latent Embedding Reconstruction
Primary area: unsupervised, self-supervised, semi-supervised, and supervised representation learning
Keywords: social networks, latent space models, structured data generation

Abstract: Network data are ubiquitous across the social sciences, biology, and information systems. Generating realistic synthetic network data has broad applications, from network simulation to scientific  discovery. However, many existing black-box approaches for network generation tend to overfit observed data while overlooking characteristic network structure, and incur substantial computational overhead at scale. These practical challenges call for synthetic network generation methods that are both efficient and capable of capturing structural properties of networks. In this paper, we introduce Synthetic Network Generation via Latent Embedding Reconstruction (SyNGLER), a general and efficient framework for synthetic network generation that builds on latent space network models. Given an observed network, SyNGLER first learns low-dimensional latent node embeddings via a latent space network model and then reconstructs the latent space by building a distribution-free generator over these embeddings. For generation, SyNGLER first samples (or resamples) node embeddings from the generator in the latent space and then produces synthetic networks using the latent space network model. Through the latent space framework, SyNGLER preserves unique characteristics in networks such as sparsity and node degree heterogeneity, while allowing for efficient training with lower computational cost than many existing deep architectures. We provide theoretical guarantees by developing consistency results regarding the distance between the true and synthetic edge distributions. Empirical studies further demonstrate the effectiveness of SyNGLER, where SyNGLER efficiently produces networks that better preserve key network characteristics such as network moments and degree distributions compared with existing approaches.