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Main Authors: Rush, Cynthia, Skerman, Fiona, Wein, Alexander S., Yang, Dana
Format: Preprint
Published: 2022
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.10872
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author Rush, Cynthia
Skerman, Fiona
Wein, Alexander S.
Yang, Dana
author_facet Rush, Cynthia
Skerman, Fiona
Wein, Alexander S.
Yang, Dana
contents Random graph models with community structure have been studied extensively in the literature. For both the problems of detecting and recovering community structure, an interesting landscape of statistical and computational phase transitions has emerged. A natural unanswered question is: might it be possible to infer properties of the community structure (for instance, the number and sizes of communities) even in situations where actually finding those communities is believed to be computationally hard? We show the answer is no. In particular, we consider certain hypothesis testing problems between models with different community structures, and we show (in the low-degree polynomial framework) that testing between two options is as hard as finding the communities. Our methods give the first computational lower bounds for testing between two different ``planted'' distributions, whereas previous results have considered testing between a planted distribution and an i.i.d. ``null'' distribution. We also show a formal relationship between the low--degree frameworks for recovery in a planted model and for testing two planted models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2212_10872
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Is it easier to count communities than find them?
Rush, Cynthia
Skerman, Fiona
Wein, Alexander S.
Yang, Dana
Statistics Theory
Computational Complexity
Data Structures and Algorithms
Combinatorics
Machine Learning
05C80, 62F03, 68Q25
F.2; G.2
Random graph models with community structure have been studied extensively in the literature. For both the problems of detecting and recovering community structure, an interesting landscape of statistical and computational phase transitions has emerged. A natural unanswered question is: might it be possible to infer properties of the community structure (for instance, the number and sizes of communities) even in situations where actually finding those communities is believed to be computationally hard? We show the answer is no. In particular, we consider certain hypothesis testing problems between models with different community structures, and we show (in the low-degree polynomial framework) that testing between two options is as hard as finding the communities. Our methods give the first computational lower bounds for testing between two different ``planted'' distributions, whereas previous results have considered testing between a planted distribution and an i.i.d. ``null'' distribution. We also show a formal relationship between the low--degree frameworks for recovery in a planted model and for testing two planted models.
title Is it easier to count communities than find them?
topic Statistics Theory
Computational Complexity
Data Structures and Algorithms
Combinatorics
Machine Learning
05C80, 62F03, 68Q25
F.2; G.2
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.10872