Fréchet Statistics Based Change Point Detection in Dynamic Social Networks

Abstract: This paper proposes a method to detect change points in dynamic social networks using Fr\'echet statistics. We address two main questions: (1) what metric can quantify the distances between graph Laplacians in a dynamic network and enable efficient computation, and (2) how can the Fr\'echet statistics be extended to detect multiple change points while maintaining the significance level of the hypothesis test? Our solution defines a metric space for graph Laplacians using the Log-Euclidean metric, enabling a closed-form formula for Fr\'echet mean and variance. We present a framework for change point detection using Fr\'echet statistics and extend it to multiple change points with binary segmentation. The proposed algorithm uses incremental computation for Fr\'echet mean and variance to improve efficiency and is validated on simulated and two real-world datasets, namely the UCI message dataset and the Enron email dataset.