Regular Article

Large-deviation properties of the largest biconnected component for random graphs

Institut für Physik, Universität Oldenburg, 26111 Oldenburg, Germany

^a e-mail: hendrik.schawe@uni-oldenburg.de

Received: 12 November 2018
Received in final form: 30 January 2019
Published online: 3 April 2019

Abstract

We study the size of the largest biconnected components in sparse Erdős–Rényi graphs with finite connectivity and Barabási–Albert graphs with non-integer mean degree. Using a statistical-mechanics inspired Monte Carlo approach we obtain numerically the distributions for different sets of parameters over almost their whole support, especially down to the rare-event tails with probabilities far less than 10⁻¹⁰⁰. This enables us to observe a qualitative difference in the behavior of the size of the largest biconnected component and the largest 2-core in the region of very small components, which is unreachable using simple sampling methods. Also, we observe a convergence to a rate function even for small sizes, which is a hint that the large deviation principle holds for these distributions.