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1. Improved Reconstruction of Random Geometric Graphs

   Dani, Varsha ; Diaz, Josep ; Hayes, Thomas P. ; Moore, Cristopher. ( June 2022 , 49th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2022))

   Bojanczyk, M. et (Ed.)

   Embedding graphs in a geographical or latent space, i.e. inferring locations for vertices in Euclidean space or on a smooth manifold or submanifold, is a common task in network analysis, statistical inference, and graph visualization. We consider the classic model of random geometric graphs where n points are scattered uniformly in a square of area n, and two points have an edge between them if and only if their Euclidean distance is less than r. The reconstruction problem then consists of inferring the vertex positions, up to the symmetries of the square, given only the adjacency matrix of the resulting graph. We give an algorithm that, if r = n^α for α > 0, with high probability reconstructs the vertex positions with a maximum error of O(n^β) where β = 1/2-(4/3)α, until α ≥ 3/8 where β = 0 and the error becomes O(√{log n}). This improves over earlier results, which were unable to reconstruct with error less than r. Our method estimates Euclidean distances using a hybrid of graph distances and short-range estimates based on the number of common neighbors. We extend our results to the surface of the sphere in ℝ³ and to hypercubes in any constant dimension. 

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2. Counting Simplices in Hypergraph Streams

   Chakrabarti, Amit ; Haris, Themistoklis ( October 2022 , Leibniz international proceedings in informatics)

   We consider the problem of space-efficiently estimating the number of simplices in a hypergraph stream. This is the most natural hypergraph generalization of the highly-studied problem of estimating the number of triangles in a graph stream. Our input is a k-uniform hypergraph H with n vertices and m hyperedges, each hyperedge being a k-sized subset of vertices. A k-simplex in H is a subhypergraph on k+1 vertices X such that all k+1 possible hyperedges among X exist in H. The goal is to process the hyperedges of H, which arrive in an arbitrary order as a data stream, and compute a good estimate of T_k(H), the number of k-simplices in H. We design a suite of algorithms for this problem. As with triangle-counting in graphs (which is the special case k = 2), sublinear space is achievable but only under a promise of the form T_k(H) ≥ T. Under such a promise, our algorithms use at most four passes and together imply a space bound of O(ε^{-2} log δ^{-1} polylog n ⋅ min{(m^{1+1/k})/T, m/(T^{2/(k+1)})}) for each fixed k ≥ 3, in order to guarantee an estimate within (1±ε)T_k(H) with probability ≥ 1-δ. We also give a simpler 1-pass algorithm that achieves O(ε^{-2} log δ^{-1} log n⋅ (m/T) (Δ_E + Δ_V^{1-1/k})) space, where Δ_E (respectively, Δ_V) denotes the maximum number of k-simplices that share a hyperedge (respectively, a vertex), which generalizes a previous result for the k = 2 case. We complement these algorithmic results with space lower bounds of the form Ω(ε^{-2}), Ω(m^{1+1/k}/T), Ω(m/T^{1-1/k}) and Ω(mΔ_V^{1/k}/T) for multi-pass algorithms and Ω(mΔ_E/T) for 1-pass algorithms, which show that some of the dependencies on parameters in our upper bounds are nearly tight. Our techniques extend and generalize several different ideas previously developed for triangle counting in graphs, using appropriate innovations to handle the more complicated combinatorics of hypergraphs. 

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3. Recovering a hidden community beyond the Kesten–Stigum threshold in O(|E|log*|V|) time

   https://doi.org/10.1017/jpr.2018.22  

   Hajek, Bruce ; Wu, Yihong ; Xu, Jiaming ( June 2018 , Journal of Applied Probability)

   Abstract Community detection is considered for a stochastic block model graph of n vertices, with K vertices in the planted community, edge probability p for pairs of vertices both in the community, and edge probability q for other pairs of vertices. The main focus of the paper is on weak recovery of the community based on the graph G , with o ( K ) misclassified vertices on average, in the sublinear regime n 1- o (1) ≤ K ≤ o ( n ). A critical parameter is the effective signal-to-noise ratio λ = K 2 ( p - q ) 2 / (( n - K ) q ), with λ = 1 corresponding to the Kesten–Stigum threshold. We show that a belief propagation (BP) algorithm achieves weak recovery if λ > 1 / e, beyond the Kesten–Stigum threshold by a factor of 1 / e. The BP algorithm only needs to run for log * n + O (1) iterations, with the total time complexity O (| E |log * n ), where log * n is the iterated logarithm of n . Conversely, if λ ≤ 1 / e, no local algorithm can asymptotically outperform trivial random guessing. Furthermore, a linear message-passing algorithm that corresponds to applying a power iteration to the nonbacktracking matrix of the graph is shown to attain weak recovery if and only if λ > 1. In addition, the BP algorithm can be combined with a linear-time voting procedure to achieve the information limit of exact recovery (correctly classify all vertices with high probability) for all K ≥ ( n / log n ) (ρ BP + o (1)), where ρ BP is a function of p / q . 

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4. Sublinear Time Hypergraph Sparsification via Cut and Edge Sampling Queries

   https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2021.53  

   Chen, Yu ; Khanna, Sanjeev ; Nagda, Sanjeev ( July 2021 , 48th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming)

   null (Ed.)

   The problem of sparsifying a graph or a hypergraph while approximately preserving its cut structure has been extensively studied and has many applications. In a seminal work, Benczúr and Karger (1996) showed that given any n-vertex undirected weighted graph G and a parameter ε ∈ (0,1), there is a near-linear time algorithm that outputs a weighted subgraph G' of G of size Õ(n/ε²) such that the weight of every cut in G is preserved to within a (1 ± ε)-factor in G'. The graph G' is referred to as a (1 ± ε)-approximate cut sparsifier of G. Subsequent recent work has obtained a similar result for the more general problem of hypergraph cut sparsifiers. However, all known sparsification algorithms require Ω(n + m) time where n denotes the number of vertices and m denotes the number of hyperedges in the hypergraph. Since m can be exponentially large in n, a natural question is if it is possible to create a hypergraph cut sparsifier in time polynomial in n, independent of the number of edges. We resolve this question in the affirmative, giving the first sublinear time algorithm for this problem, given appropriate query access to the hypergraph. Specifically, we design an algorithm that constructs a (1 ± ε)-approximate cut sparsifier of a hypergraph H(V,E) in polynomial time in n, independent of the number of hyperedges, when given access to the hypergraph using the following two queries: 1) given any cut (S, ̄S), return the size |δ_E(S)| (cut value queries); and 2) given any cut (S, ̄S), return a uniformly at random edge crossing the cut (cut edge sample queries). Our algorithm outputs a sparsifier with Õ(n/ε²) edges, which is essentially optimal. We then extend our results to show that cut value and cut edge sample queries can also be used to construct hypergraph spectral sparsifiers in poly(n) time, independent of the number of hyperedges. We complement the algorithmic results above by showing that any algorithm that has access to only one of the above two types of queries can not give a hypergraph cut sparsifier in time that is polynomial in n. Finally, we show that our algorithmic results also hold if we replace the cut edge sample queries with a pair neighbor sample query that for any pair of vertices, returns a random edge incident on them. In contrast, we show that having access only to cut value queries and queries that return a random edge incident on a given single vertex, is not sufficient. 

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5. Finding a planted clique by adaptive probing

   https://doi.org/10.30757/ALEA.v17-30  

   Racz, Miklos Z ; Schiffer, Benjamin ( August 2020 , Alea)

   null (Ed.)

   We consider a variant of the planted clique problem where we are allowed unbounded computational time but can only investigate a small part of the graph by adaptive edge queries. We determine (up to logarithmic factors) the number of queries necessary both for detecting the presence of a planted clique and for finding the planted clique. Specifically, let $G \sim G(n,1/2,k)$ be a random graph on $n$ vertices with a planted clique of size $k$. We show that no algorithm that makes at most $q = o(n^2 / k^2 + n)$ adaptive queries to the adjacency matrix of $G$ is likely to find the planted clique. On the other hand, when $k \geq (2+\epsilon) \log_2 n$ there exists a simple algorithm (with unbounded computational power) that finds the planted clique with high probability by making $q = O( (n^2 / k^2) \log^2 n + n \log n)$ adaptive queries. For detection, the additive $n$ term is not necessary: the number of queries needed to detect the presence of a planted clique is $n^2 / k^2$ (up to logarithmic factors). 

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