  Even though power-law or close-to-power-law degree distributions are
ubiquitously observed in a great variety of large real networks, the
mathematically satisfactory treatment of random power-law graphs satisfying
basic statistical requirements of realism is still lacking. These requirements
are: sparsity, exchangeability, projectivity, and unbiasedness. The last
requirement states that entropy of the graph ensemble must be maximized under
the degree distribution constraints. Here we prove that the hypersoft
configuration model (HSCM), belonging to the class of random graphs with latent
hyperparameters, also known as inhomogeneous random graphs or $W$-random
graphs, is an ensemble of random power-law graphs that are sparse, unbiased,
and either exchangeable or projective. The proof of their unbiasedness relies
on generalized graphons, and on mapping the problem of maximization of the
normalized Gibbs entropy of a random graph ensemble, to the graphon entropy
maximization problem, showing that the two entropies converge to each other in
the large-graph limit.
