Lower threshold ground state energy and testability of minimal balanced cut density

Abstract

Lovász and his coauthors defined the notion of microcanonical ground state energy $\hat{\mathcal{E}}_\mathbb{a} (G,J)$ -- borrowed from the statistical physics -- for weighted graphs $G$, where $\mathbb{a}$ is a probability distribution on $\{1,...,q\}$ and $J$ is a symmetric $q \times q$ matrix with real entries. We define a new version of the ground state energy, $\hat{\mathcal{E}}^c (G,J)=\inf_{\mathbb{a}\in A_c}\hat{\mathcal{E}}_\mathbb{a} (G,J)$, called lower threshold ground state energy, where $A_c = \{\mathbb{a} :\, a_i\ge c,\,i=1,\dots, q \}$. Both types of energies can be extended for graphons $W$, the limit objects of convergent sequences of simple graphs. In the main result of the paper it is stated that if $0\leq c_1<c_2 \leq 1$, then the convergence of the sequences $(\hat{\mathcal{E}}^{c_2/q} (G_n,J))$ for each $J$ implies convergence of the sequences $(\hat{\mathcal{E}}^{c_1/q} (G_n,J))$ for each $J$. As a byproduct one can derive in a natural way the testability of minimum balanced multiway cut densities, that is one of the fundamental problems of cluster analysis.