Bootstrap percolation on the stochastic block model with k communities

Abstract

We analyze the bootstrap percolation process on the stochastic block model (SBM), a natural extension of the Erdös-Rényi random graph that allows representing the "community structure" observed in many real systems. In the SBM, nodes are partitioned into subsets, which represent different communities, and pairs of nodes are independently connected with a probability that depends on the communities they belong to. Under mild assumptions on system parameters, we prove the existence of a sharp phase transition for the final number of active nodes and characterize sub-critical and super-critical regimes in terms of the number of initially active nodes, which are selected uniformly at random in each community.