Equivalence of replica and cavity methods for computing spectra of   sparse random matrices
  We show by direct calculation that the replica and cavity methods are exactly equivalent for the spectrum of Erdos-Renyi random graph. We introduce a variational formulation based on the cavity method and use it to find approximate solutions for the density of eigenvalues. We also use this variational method for calculating spectra of sparse covariance matrices. 
Frantisek Slanina
cond-mat.stat-mech cond-mat.dis-nn