Let count copies of the complete graph in . Its expected value is
Write as a sum of indicator random variable. Indicators for two distinct copies are independent when the copies share at most one vertex, since their edge sets are then disjoint. Pairs sharing two vertices have eleven edges in their union, while pairs sharing three have nine. It follows that
Thus . By the second moment method, in probability, so . This is the sparse clique-count concentration estimate.
Vertex-disjoint sparse clique copies Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-24
For , the expected number of pairs of copies sharing a vertex is
Thus, with probability tending to one, all the copies are vertex-disjoint. Together with sparse clique-count concentration, this gives arbitrarily many vertex-disjoint copies with probability tending to one.