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Abstract:
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Linear regression on a set of observations linked by a network has been an essential tool in modeling the relationship between response and covariates with additional network data. Despite its wide range of applications in many areas, such as social sciences and health-related research, the problem has not been well-studied in statistics so far. Previous methods either lack of inference tools or rely on restrictive assumptions on social effects, and usually treat the network structure as precisely observed, which is too good to be true in many problems. We propose a linear regression model with nonparametric social effects. Our model does not assume the relational data or network structure to be accurately observed; thus, our method can be provably robust to a certain level of perturbation of the network structure. We establish a full set of computationally efficient asymptotic inference tools under a general requirement of the perturbation and then study the robustness of our method in the specific setting when the perturbation is from random network models. We discover a phase-transition phenomenon of inference validity concerning the network density when no prior knowledge about
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