Large independent sets in recursive Markov random graphs

Abstract: Computing the maximum size of an independent set in a graph is a famously hard combinatorial problem that has been well-studied for various classes of graphs. When it comes to random graphs, only the classical Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi-Gilbert random graph $G_{n,p}$ has been analysed and shown to have largest independent sets of size $\Theta(\log{n})$ w.h.p. This classical model does not capture any dependency structure between edges that can appear in real-world networks. We initiate study in this direction by defining random graphs $G^{r}_{n,p}$ whose existence of edges is determined by a Markov process that is also governed by a decay parameter $r\in(0,1]$. We prove that w.h.p. $G^{r}_{n,p}$ has independent sets of size $(\frac{1-r}{2+\epsilon}) \frac{n}{\log{n}}$ for arbitrary $\epsilon > 0$, which implies an asymptotic lower bound of $\Omega(\pi(n))$ where $\pi(n)$ is the prime-counting function. This is derived using bounds on the terms of a harmonic series, Tur\'an bound on stability number, and a concentration analysis for a certain sequence of dependent Bernoulli variables that may also be of independent interest. Since $G^{r}_{n,p}$ collapses to $G_{n,p}$ when there is no decay, it follows that having even the slightest bit of dependency (any $r < 1$) in the random graph construction leads to the presence of large independent sets and thus our random model has a phase transition at its boundary value of $r=1$. For the maximal independent set output by a greedy algorithm, we deduce that it has a performance ratio of at most $1 + \frac{\log{n}}{(1-r)}$ w.h.p. when the lowest degree vertex is picked at each iteration, and also show that under any other permutation of vertices the algorithm outputs a set of size $\Omega(n^{1/1+\tau})$, where $\tau=1/(1-r)$, and hence has a performance ratio of $O(n^{\frac{1}{2-r}})$.