Combinatorial-Probabilistic Trade-Off: P-Values of Community Properties Test in the Stochastic Block Models

Shuting Shen, Junwei Lu

Keywords: combinatorial inference, stochastic block models, community properties, minimax lower bound

TL;DR: We propose an inferential framework testing the general community combinatorial properties of the stochastic block model and prove the minimax lower bound of the general community property test.

Abstract: We propose an inferential framework testing the general community combinatorial properties of the stochastic block model. We aim to test the hypothesis on whether a certain community property is satisfied, e.g., whether a given set of nodes belong to the same community, and provide p-values for uncertainty quantification. Our framework is applicable to all symmetric community properties. To ease the challenges caused by the combinatorial nature of community properties, we develop a novel shadowing bootstrap method. Utilizing the symmetry, our method can find a shadowing representative of the true assignment and the number of tested assignments in the alternative is largely reduced. In theory, we introduce a combinatorial distance between two community classes and show a combinatorial-probabilistic trade-off phenomenon. Our test is honest as long as the product of the combinatorial distance between two communities and the probabilistic distance between two connection probabilities is sufficiently large. Besides, we show that such trade-off also exists in the information-theoretic lower bound. We also implement numerical experiments to show the validity of our method.

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