Cutoff for random walk on random graphs with a community structure
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 and an outgoing number of half-edges. Given a stochastic matrix , we pick a random perfect matching of the half-edges subject to the constraint that each vertex has neighbours inside its community and the proportion of outgoing half-edges from community matched to a half-edge from community is . 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 times (where 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.
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}
}