Network homophily via multi-dimensional extensions of Cantelli's inequality
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Homophily is the principle whereby "similarity breeds connections". We give a quantitative formulation of this principle within networks. We say that a network is homophillic with respect to a given labeled partition of its vertices, when the classes of the partition induce subgraphs that are significantly denser than what we expect under a random labeled partition into classes maintaining the same cardinalities (type). This is the recently introduced random coloring model for network homophily. In this perspective, the vector whose entries are the sizes of the subgraphs induced by the corresponding classes, is viewed as the observed outcome of the random vector described by picking labeled partitions at random among partitions with the same type. Consequently, the input network is homophillic at the significance level α whenever the one-sided tail probability of observing an outcome at least as extreme as the observed one, is smaller than α. Clearly, α can also be thought of as a quantifier of homophily in the scale [0,1]. Since, as we show, even approximating this tail probability is an NP-hard problem, we resort multidimensional extensions of classical Cantelli's inequality to bound α from above. This upper bound is the homophily index we propose. It requires the knowledge of the covariance matrix of the random vector, which was not previously known within the random coloring model. In this paper we close this gap by computing the covariance matrix of subgraph sizes under the random coloring model. Interestingly, the matrix depends on the input partition only through its type and on the network only through its degrees. Furthermore all the covariances have the same sign and this sign is a graph invariant. Plugging this structure into Cantelli's bound yields a meaningful, easy to compute index for measuring network homophily.
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