Heterogeneous dense subhypergraph detection

Abstract We study the problem of testing the existence of a heterogeneous dense subhypergraph. The null hypothesis corresponds to a heterogeneous Erdös–Rényi uniform random hypergraph and the alternative hypothesis corresponds to a heterogeneous uniform random hypergraph that contains a dense subhypergraph. We establish detection boundaries when the edge probabilities are known and construct an asymptotically powerful test for distinguishing the hypotheses. We also construct an adaptive test which does not involve edge probabilities, and hence, is more practically useful.