A Fast Binary Splitting Approach for Non-Adaptive Learning of Erdős--Rényi Graphs

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Hauptverfasser: Ta, Hoang, Scarlett, Jonathan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Ta, Hoang
Scarlett, Jonathan
author_facet Ta, Hoang
Scarlett, Jonathan
contents We study the problem of learning an unknown graph via group queries on node subsets, where each query reports whether at least one edge is present among the queried nodes. In general, learning arbitrary graphs with $n$ nodes and $k$ edges is hard in the non-adaptive setting, requiring $Ω\big(\min\{k^2\log n,\,n^2\}\big)$ tests even when a small error probability is allowed. We focus on learning Erdős--Rényi (ER) graphs $G\sim\mathrm{ER}(n,q)$ in the non-adaptive setting, where the expected number of edges is $\bar{k}=q\binom{n}{2}$, and we aim to design an efficient testing--decoding scheme achieving asymptotically vanishing error probability. Prior work (Li--Fresacher--Scarlett, NeurIPS 2019) presents a testing--decoding scheme that attains an order-optimal number of tests $O(\bar{k}\log n)$ but incurs $Ω(n^2)$ decoding time, whereas their proposed sublinear-time algorithm incurs an extra $(\log \bar{k})(\log n)$ factor in the number of tests. We extend the binary splitting approach, recently developed for non-adaptive group testing, to the ER graph learning setting, and prove that the edge set can be recovered with high probability using $O(\bar{k}\log n)$ tests while attaining decoding time $O(\bar{k}^{1+δ}\log n)$ for any fixed $δ>0$.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_17240
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Fast Binary Splitting Approach for Non-Adaptive Learning of Erdős--Rényi Graphs
Ta, Hoang
Scarlett, Jonathan
Information Theory
Discrete Mathematics
Machine Learning
Probability
We study the problem of learning an unknown graph via group queries on node subsets, where each query reports whether at least one edge is present among the queried nodes. In general, learning arbitrary graphs with $n$ nodes and $k$ edges is hard in the non-adaptive setting, requiring $Ω\big(\min\{k^2\log n,\,n^2\}\big)$ tests even when a small error probability is allowed. We focus on learning Erdős--Rényi (ER) graphs $G\sim\mathrm{ER}(n,q)$ in the non-adaptive setting, where the expected number of edges is $\bar{k}=q\binom{n}{2}$, and we aim to design an efficient testing--decoding scheme achieving asymptotically vanishing error probability. Prior work (Li--Fresacher--Scarlett, NeurIPS 2019) presents a testing--decoding scheme that attains an order-optimal number of tests $O(\bar{k}\log n)$ but incurs $Ω(n^2)$ decoding time, whereas their proposed sublinear-time algorithm incurs an extra $(\log \bar{k})(\log n)$ factor in the number of tests. We extend the binary splitting approach, recently developed for non-adaptive group testing, to the ER graph learning setting, and prove that the edge set can be recovered with high probability using $O(\bar{k}\log n)$ tests while attaining decoding time $O(\bar{k}^{1+δ}\log n)$ for any fixed $δ>0$.
title A Fast Binary Splitting Approach for Non-Adaptive Learning of Erdős--Rényi Graphs
topic Information Theory
Discrete Mathematics
Machine Learning
Probability
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.17240