We study a random graph model for small-world networks which are ubiquitous in social and biological sciences. In this model, a dense cycle of expected bandwidth$n \tau $, representing the hidden one-dimensional geometry of vertices, is planted in an ambient random graph on n vertices. For both detection and recovery of the planted dense cycle, we characterize the information-theoretic thresholds in terms of n,$\tau $, and an edge-wise signal-to-noise ratio$\lambda $. In particular, the information-theoretic thresholds differ from the computational thresholds established in a recent work for low-degree polynomial algorithms, thereby justifying the existence of statistical-to-computational gaps for this problem.

Planted dense cycles are a type of latent structure that appears in many applications, such as small-world networks in social sciences and sequence assembly in computational biology. We consider a model where a dense cycle with expected bandwidth $n \tau$ and edge density $p$ is planted in an Erdős–Rényi graph $G(n,q)$. We characterize the computational thresholds for the associated detection and recovery problems for the class of low-degree polynomial algorithms. In particular, a gap exists between the two thresholds in a certain regime of parameters. For example, if $n^{-3/4} \ll \tau \ll n^{-1/2}$ and $p = C q = \Theta(1)$ for a constant $C>1$, the detection problem is computationally easy while the recovery problem is hard for low-degree algorithms.