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Main Authors: Bhamidi, Shankar, Gamarnik, David, Gong, Shuyang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19259
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author Bhamidi, Shankar
Gamarnik, David
Gong, Shuyang
author_facet Bhamidi, Shankar
Gamarnik, David
Gong, Shuyang
contents We consider the problem of finding a dense submatrix of a matrix with i.i.d. Gaussian entries, where density is measured by average value. This problem arose from practical applications in biology and social sciences \cites{madeira-survey,shabalin2009finding} and is known to exhibit a computation-to-optimization gap between the optimal value and best values achievable by existing polynomial time algorithms. In this paper we consider the class of online algorithms, which includes the best known algorithm for this problem, and derive a tight approximation factor ${4\over 3\sqrt{2}}$ for this class. The result is established using a simple implementation of recently developed Branching-Overlap-Gap-Property \cite{huang2025tight}. We further extend our results to $(\mathbb R^n)^{\otimes p}$ tensors with i.i.d. Gaussian entries, for which the approximation factor is proven to be ${2\sqrt{p}/(1+p)}$.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_19259
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Finding a dense submatrix of a random matrix. Sharp bounds for online algorithms
Bhamidi, Shankar
Gamarnik, David
Gong, Shuyang
Probability
Statistics Theory
62G32 60G70, 68Q17
We consider the problem of finding a dense submatrix of a matrix with i.i.d. Gaussian entries, where density is measured by average value. This problem arose from practical applications in biology and social sciences \cites{madeira-survey,shabalin2009finding} and is known to exhibit a computation-to-optimization gap between the optimal value and best values achievable by existing polynomial time algorithms. In this paper we consider the class of online algorithms, which includes the best known algorithm for this problem, and derive a tight approximation factor ${4\over 3\sqrt{2}}$ for this class. The result is established using a simple implementation of recently developed Branching-Overlap-Gap-Property \cite{huang2025tight}. We further extend our results to $(\mathbb R^n)^{\otimes p}$ tensors with i.i.d. Gaussian entries, for which the approximation factor is proven to be ${2\sqrt{p}/(1+p)}$.
title Finding a dense submatrix of a random matrix. Sharp bounds for online algorithms
topic Probability
Statistics Theory
62G32 60G70, 68Q17
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19259