  We consider the problem of the assignment of nodes into communities from a
set of hyperedges, where every hyperedge is a noisy observation of the
community assignment of the adjacent nodes. We focus in particular on the
sparse regime where the number of edges is of the same order as the number of
vertices. We propose a spectral method based on a generalization of the
non-backtracking Hashimoto matrix into hypergraphs. We analyze its performance
on a planted generative model and compare it with other spectral methods and
with Bayesian belief propagation (which was conjectured to be asymptotically
optimal for this model). We conclude that the proposed spectral method detects
communities whenever belief propagation does, while having the important
advantages to be simpler, entirely nonparametric, and to be able to learn the
rule according to which the hyperedges were generated without prior
information.
