Localization of dominant eigenpairs and planted communities by means of Frobenius inner products

We propose a new localization result for the leading eigenvalue and eigenvector of a symmetric matrix A. The result exploits the Frobenius inner product between A and a given rank-one landmark matrix X. Different choices for X may be used, depending upon the problem under investigation. In particular, we show that the choice where X is the all-ones matrix allows to estimate the signature of the leading eigenvector of A, generalizing previous results on Perron-Frobenius properties of matrices with some negative entries. As another application we consider the problem of community detection in graphs and networks. The problem is solved by means of modularity-based spectral techniques, following the ideas pioneered by Miroslav Fiedler in mid 70s. We show that a suitable choice of X can be used to provide new quality guarantees of those techniques, when the network follows a stochastic block model.