Planted clique detection and recovery from the hypergraph adjacency matrix

Abstract

Hypergraph data are often projected onto a weighted graph by constructing an adjacency matrix whose $(i,j)$ entry counts the number of hyperedges containing both nodes $i$ and $j$. This reduction is computationally convenient, but it can lose information: distinct hypergraphs may induce the same matrix, and the matrix entries are generally dependent because each hyperedge contributes to multiple pairs. We study the planted clique problem under this matrix-only observation model. For detection, we show that a spectral norm test is asymptotically powerful at the $\sqrt{n}$ scale, with explicit dependence on the background hyperedge probability $p$. For recovery, we analyze a polynomial-time spectral method based on the leading eigenvector and prove exact recovery at the canonical $\sqrt{n}$ scale, again with explicit dependence on $p$. We also extend both results to sparse regimes in which the hyperedge probability may depend on \(n\). Our analysis adapts a leave--one--out eigenvector framework to this setting. These results provide rigorous detection and recovery guarantees when only the adjacency matrix is observed.