The minimum of the graph likelihood

Abstract: The likelihood of a finite simple undirected graph $G$ on $n$ vertices is the probability that the uniform sequential attachment process, which at each step joins a new vertex to a uniformly random subset of uniformly random size of the vertices already present, outputs a graph isomorphic to $G$. Dervovic, Mocherla and Severini conjectured that the likelihood is minimised by the balanced complete bipartite graph. We prove that, among complete bipartite graphs of a given order, the balanced one uniquely minimises the likelihood. Exact computation shows that it also minimises over all graphs for every order from $6$ through $14$, and that the first counterexample occurs at $n=15$. The blow-up of the five cycle by independent sets of size three, equivalently the circulant on fifteen vertices with connection set ${1,4,6}$, has likelihood $0.20128\ldots$ times that of $K_{7,8}$, and it is again triangle-free. We show that the failure is not sporadic by proving that the likelihood of the balanced complete bipartite graph is $2^{{-(1/2-1/(8\ln} 2)+o(1))n<sup>2}$, whereas the minimum over all graphs of order $n$ is $2<sup>{-(1/2+o(1))n<sup>2}$, so the conjectured minimiser exceeds the minimum by a factor exponential in $n<sup>2$. We also determine the Shannon entropy of the process to leading order, namely $n^2/(4\ln 2)$ bits, which shows that the conjectured minimiser is in fact more likely than a typical output of the process. The proofs rest on a vertex deletion recurrence which evaluates the likelihood in time $O(n\,2<sup>n)$ and which closes on the blow-ups of any fixed base graph.