Estimating network degree distributions under sampling: An inverse problem, with applications to monitoring social media networks

Networks are a popular tool for representing elements in a system and their interconnectedness. Many observed networks can be viewed as only samples of some true underlying network. Such is frequently the case, for example, in the monitoring and study of massive, online social networks. We study the problem of how to estimate the degree distribution—an object of fundamental interest—of a true underlying network from its sampled network. In...