Factors of IID on Trees

Classical ergodic theory for integer-group actions uses entropy as a complete invariant for isomorphism of IID (independent, identically distributed) processes (a.k.a. product measures). This theory holds for amenable groups as well. Despite recent spectacular progress of Bowen, the situation for non-amenable groups, including free groups, is still largely mysterious. We present some illustrative results and open questions on free groups, which are particularly interesting in combinatorics, statistical physics, and probability. Our results include bounds on minimum and maximum bisection for random cubic graphs that improve on all past bounds.Comment: 18 pages, 1 figur

Maximum edge-cuts in cubic graphs with large girth and in random cubic graphs

We show that for every cubic graph G with sufficiently large girth there exists a probability distribution on edge-cuts of G such that each edge is in a randomly chosen cut with probability at least 0.88672. This implies that G contains an edge-cut of size at least 1.33008n, where n is the number of vertices of G, and has fractional cut covering number at most 1.127752. The lower bound on the size of maximum edge-cut also applies to random cubic graphs. Specifically, a random n-vertex cubic graph a.a.s. contains an edge cut of size 1.33008n

Modularity of regular and treelike graphs

Clustering algorithms for large networks typically use modularity values to test which partitions of the vertex set better represent structure in the data. The modularity of a graph is the maximum modularity of a partition. We consider the modularity of two kinds of graphs. For $r$-regular graphs with a given number of vertices, we investigate the minimum possible modularity, the typical modularity, and the maximum possible modularity. In particular, we see that for random cubic graphs the modularity is usually in the interval $(0.666, 0.804)$, and for random $r$-regular graphs with large $r$ it usually is of order $1/\sqrt{r}$. These results help to establish baselines for statistical tests on regular graphs. The modularity of cycles and low degree trees is known to be close to 1: we extend these results to `treelike' graphs, where the product of treewidth and maximum degree is much less than the number of edges. This yields for example the (deterministic) lower bound $0.666$ mentioned above on the modularity of random cubic graphs.Comment: 25 page

Independent sets and cuts in large-girth regular graphs

We present a local algorithm producing an independent set of expected size $0.44533n$ on large-girth 3-regular graphs and $0.40407n$ on large-girth 4-regular graphs. We also construct a cut (or bisection or bipartite subgraph) with $1.34105n$ edges on large-girth 3-regular graphs. These decrease the gaps between the best known upper and lower bounds from $0.0178$ to $0.01$, from $0.0242$ to $0.0123$ and from $0.0724$ to $0.0616$, respectively. We are using local algorithms, therefore, the method also provides upper bounds for the fractional coloring numbers of $1 / 0.44533 \approx 2.24554$ and $1 / 0.40407 \approx 2.4748$ and fractional edge coloring number $1.5 / 1.34105 \approx 1.1185$. Our algorithms are applications of the technique introduced by Hoppen and Wormald