English

Cutoff for random walk on random graphs with a community structure

Probability 2025-07-08 v2

Abstract

We consider a variant of the configuration model with an embedded community structure and study the mixing properties of a simple random walk on it. Every vertex has an internal degint3\mathrm{deg}^{\text{int}}\geq 3 and an outgoing degout\mathrm{deg}^{\text{out}} number of half-edges. Given a stochastic matrix QQ, we pick a random perfect matching of the half-edges subject to the constraint that each vertex vv has degint(v)\mathrm{deg}^{\text{int}}(v) neighbours inside its community and the proportion of outgoing half-edges from community ii matched to a half-edge from community jj is Q(i,j)Q(i,j). Assuming the number of communities is constant and they all have comparable sizes, we prove the following dichotomy: simple random walk on the resulting graph exhibits cutoff if and only if the product of the Cheeger constant of QQ times logn\log n (where nn is the number of vertices) diverges. In [4], Ben-Hamou established a dichotomy for cutoff for a non-backtracking random walk on a similar random graph model with 2 communities. We prove the same characterisation of cutoff holds for simple random walk.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2212.04469,
  title  = {Cutoff for random walk on random graphs with a community structure},
  author = {Jonathan Hermon and Anđela Šarković and Perla Sousi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.04469},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T07:26:35.996Z