Node regression consists in predicting the value of a graph label at a node, given observations at the other nodes. To gain some insight into the performance of various estimators for this task, we perform a theoretical study in a context where the graph is random. Specifically, we assume that the graph is generated by a Latent Position Model, where each node of the graph has a latent position, and the probability that two nodes are connected depend on the distance between the latent positions of the two nodes. In this context, we begin by studying the simplest possible estimator for graph regression, which consists in averaging the value of the label at all neighboring nodes. We show that in Latent Position Models this estimator tends to a Nadaraya-Watson estimator in the latent space, and that its rate of convergence is in fact the same. One issue with this standard estimator is that it averages over a region consisting of all neighbors of a node, and that depending on the graph model this may be too much or too little. An alternative consists in first estimating the "true" distances between the latent positions, then injecting these estimated distances into a classical Nadaraya-Watson estimator. This enables averaging in regions either smaller or larger than the typical graph neighborhood. We show that this method can achieve standard nonparametric rates in certain instances even when the graph neighborhood is too large or too small.

Given a graph with a subset of labeled nodes, we are interested in the quality of the averaging estimator which for an unlabeled node predicts the average of the observations of its labeled neighbors. We rigorously study concentration properties, variance bounds and risk bounds in this context. While the estimator itself is very simple we believe that our results will contribute towards the theoretical understanding of learning on graphs through more sophisticated methods such as Graph Neural Networks.