Speaker: Harry Crane (Rutgers)

Title: Probabilistic symmetries in networks

I discuss various refinements and extensions of the principle of exchangeability, focusing on 3 specific cases:

1. Relative exchangeability, by which the distribution of a random graph is invariant with respect to the symmetries of some other structure.

2. Combinatorial Markov processes for temporally varying networks.

3. Edge exchangeable random graphs, a new invariance principle that resolves a major challenge in modeling network datasets that are sparse and/or exhibit power law degree distributions.

Each case leads to a characterization theorem that parallels prior work by Aldous-Hoover-Kallenberg (in case 1), Levy-Ito-Khintchine (in case 2), and de Finetti and Kingman (in case 3).  Though the discussion applies more generally, I phrase much of the presentation in the specific context of random graphs.