Statistical Algorithms and a Lower Bound for Detecting Planted Cliques

We introduce a framework for proving lower bounds on computational problems over distributions against algorithms that can be implemented using access to a statistical query oracle. For such algorithms, access to the input distribution is limited to obtaining an estimate of the expectation of any given function on a sample drawn randomly from the input distribution rather than directly accessing samples. Most natural algorithms of interest in theory and in practice, for example, moments-based methods, local search, standard iterative methods for convex optimization, MCMC, and simulated annealing, can be implemented in this framework. Our framework is based on, and generalizes, the statistical query model in learning theory [Kearns 1998]. Our main application is a nearly optimal lower bound on the complexity of any statistical query algorithm for detecting planted bipartite clique distributions (or planted dense subgraph distributions) when the planted clique has size O(n1/2 − δ) for any constant δ > 0. The assumed hardness of variants of these problems has been used to prove hardness of several other problems and as a guarantee for security in cryptographic applications. Our lower bounds provide concrete evidence of hardness, thus supporting these assumptions.