Recovering Unbalanced Communities in the Stochastic Block Model With Application to Clustering with a Faulty Oracle

The stochastic block model (SBM) is a fundamental model for studying graph clustering or community detection in networks. It has received great attention in the last decade and the balanced case, i.e., assuming all clusters have large size, has been well studied. However, our understanding of SBM with unbalanced communities (arguably, more relevant in practice) is still very limited. In this paper, we provide a simple SVD-based algorithm for recovering the communities in the SBM with communities of varying sizes. We improve upon a result of Ailon, Chen and Xu [ICML 2013] by removing the assumption that there is a large interval such that the sizes of clusters do not fall in. Under the planted clique conjecture, the size of the clusters that can be recovered by our algorithm is nearly optimal (up to polylogarithmic factors) when the probability parameters are constant. As a byproduct, we obtain a polynomial-time algorithm with sublinear query complexity for a clustering problem with a faulty oracle, which finds all clusters of size larger than $\tilde{\Omega}({\sqrt{n}})$ even if $\Omega(n)$ small clusters co-exist in the graph. In contrast, all the previous efficient algorithms that makes sublinear number of queries cannot recover any large cluster, if there are more than $\tilde{\Omega}(n^{2/5})$ small clusters.