Journal ArticleRecovering a hidden community beyond the Kesten–Stigum threshold in O(|E|log*|V|) timeHajek, Bruce; Wu, Yihong; Xu, JiamingAbstract 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 .2018-06-0110089330Journal of Applied Probability5502325 to 3520021-9002https://doi.org/10.1017/jpr.2018.221651588National Science Foundation