# Planting trees in graphs, and finding them back

2 DYOGENE - Dynamics of Geometric Networks
DI-ENS - Département d'informatique de l'École normale supérieure, CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique : UMR 8548, Inria de Paris
Abstract : In this paper we study detection and reconstruction of planted structures in Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi random graphs. Motivated by a problem of communication security, we focus on planted structures that consist in a tree graph. For planted line graphs, we establish the following phase diagram. In a low density region where the average degree $\lambda$ of the initial graph is below some critical value $\lambda_c=1$, detection and reconstruction go from impossible to easy as the line length $K$ crosses some critical value $f(\lambda)\ln(n)$, where $n$ is the number of nodes in the graph. In the high density region $\lambda>\lambda_c$, detection goes from impossible to easy as $K$ goes from $o(\sqrt{n})$ to $\omega(\sqrt{n})$, and reconstruction remains impossible so long as $K=o(n)$. For $D$-ary trees of varying depth $h$ and $2\le D\le O(1)$, we identify a low-density region $\lambda<\lambda_D$, such that the following holds. There is a threshold $h*=g(D)\ln(\ln(n))$ with the following properties. Detection goes from feasible to impossible as $h$ crosses $h*$. We also show that only partial reconstruction is feasible at best for $h\ge h*$. We conjecture a similar picture to hold for $D$-ary trees as for lines in the high-density region $\lambda>\lambda_D$, but confirm only the following part of this picture: Detection is easy for $D$-ary trees of size $\omega(\sqrt{n})$, while at best only partial reconstruction is feasible for $D$-ary trees of any size $o(n)$. These results are in contrast with the corresponding picture for detection and reconstruction of {\em low rank} planted structures, such as dense subgraphs and block communities: We observe a discrepancy between detection and reconstruction, the latter being impossible for a wide range of parameters where detection is easy. This property does not hold for previously studied low rank planted structures.
Document type :
Conference papers
Domain :

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02427845
Contributor : Laurent Massoulié <>
Submitted on : Saturday, January 4, 2020 - 12:12:34 PM
Last modification on : Wednesday, January 15, 2020 - 8:32:12 AM

### Identifiers

• HAL Id : hal-02427845, version 1
• ARXIV : 1811.01800

### Citation

Laurent Massoulié, Ludovic Stephan, Don Towsley. Planting trees in graphs, and finding them back. COLT 2019 - Conference on Learning Theory, Jun 2019, Phoenix, United States. ⟨hal-02427845⟩

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