A combinatorial intervention, consisting of multiple treatments applied to a single unit with potential interactive effects, has substantial applications in fields such as biomedicine, engineering, and beyond. Given $p$ possible treatments, conducting all possible $2^p$ combinatorial interventions can be laborious and quickly becomes infeasible as $p$ increases. Here we introduce the probabilistic factorial experimental design, formalized from how scientists perform lab experiments. In this framework, the experimenter selects a dosage for each possible treatment and applies it to a group of units. Each unit independently receives a random combination of treatments, sampled from a product Bernoulli distribution determined by the dosages. Additionally, the experimenter can carry out such experiments over multiple rounds, adapting the design in an active manner. We address the optimal experimental design problem within a novel intervention model that imposes bounded-degree interactions between treatments. In the passive setting, we provide a closed-form solution for the near-optimal design. Our results prove that a dosage of $\frac{1}{2}$ for each treatment is optimal up to a factor of $1+O(\frac{\ln(n)}{n})$ for estimating any $k$-way interaction model, regardless of $k$, and imply that $O\big(kp^{3k}\ln(p)\big)$ observations are required to accurately estimate this model. For the multi-round setting, we provide a near-optimal acquisition function that can be numerically optimized. We also explore several extensions of the design problem and finally validate our findings through simulations.

In sparse Erdős-Rényi graphs, it is known that a linear-time algorithm of Karp and Sipser achieves near-optimal matching sizes asymptotically almost surely, giving a law-of-large numbers for the matching numbers of such graphs in terms of solutions to an ODE [Jonathan Aronson et al., 1998]. We provide an extension of this analysis, identifying broad ranges of stochastic block model parameters for which the Karp-Sipser algorithm achieves near-optimal matching sizes, but demonstrating that it cannot perform optimally on general stochastic block model instances. We also consider the problem of constructing a matching online, in which the vertices of one half of a bipartite stochastic block model arrive one-at-a-time, and must be matched as they arrive. We show that, when the expected degrees in all communities are equal, the competitive ratio lower bound of 0.837 found by Mastin and Jaillet for the Erdős-Rényi case [Andrew Mastin and Patrick Jaillet, 2013] is achieved by a simple greedy algorithm, and this competitive ratio is optimal. We then propose and analyze a linear-time online matching algorithm with better performance in general stochastic block models.