There are so many possible answers and the subject is so large! <p>When the parametric family of distributions is some exponential family, there is this recent and very elegant paper: - [Consistency under Sampling of Exponential Random Graph Models][1] Although it is focused on studying exponential random graph models, which are commonly used in modeling social networks (and other network models), the framework is quite general. [1]: http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.3054