Regularity method and large deviation principles for the Erd\H{o}s--R\'enyi hypergraph

Abstract

We develop a quantitative large deviations theory for random hypergraphs, which rests on tensor decomposition and counting lemmas under a novel family of cut-type norms. As our main application, we obtain sharp asymptotics for joint upper and lower tails of homomorphism counts in the $r$-uniform Erd\H{o}s--R\'enyi hypergraph for any fixed $r\ge 2$, generalizing and improving on previous results for the Erd\H{o}s--R\'enyi graph ($r=2$). The theory is sufficiently quantitative to allow the density of the hypergraph to vanish at a polynomial rate, and additionally yields tail asymptotics for other nonlinear functionals, such as induced homomorphism counts.