Volume 1 (2005)
Article 9 pp. 177-216
Linear Equations, Arithmetic Progressions and Hypergraph Property Testing
by Noga Alon and Asaf Shapira
Received: January 12, 2005
Published: October 12, 2005
Keywords: Property Testing, Hypergraphs, Lower Bounds, Additive Number Theory, Linear Algebra, Extremal Problems
ACM Classification: G.2.2, F.2.2
AMS Classification: 05C65, 68R10
Abstract:
[Plain Text Version]
For a fixed k-uniform hypergraph D
(k-graph for short, k ≥ 3),
we say that a k-graph H satisfies property PD
(or property P*D) if it contains no copy
(or no induced copy) of D. Our goal in this paper is to classify
the k-graphs D for which there are property-testers for
testing PD and P*D
whose query complexity is polynomial in 1/ε. For such
k-graphs we say that property
PD (or property P*D)
is easily testable.
For P*D we prove that aside from a single 3-graph,
P*D is easily testable if and only if
D is a single k-edge. We further show that for large
k, one can use more sophisticated techniques in order to obtain
better lower bounds for any large enough k-graph. These results
extend and improve the authors' previous results about graphs (SODA 2004)
and results by Kohayakawa, Nagle and Rödl on k-graphs
(ICALP 2002).
For PD, we show that for any k-partite
k-graph D, property PD is easily
testable. This is established by giving an efficient one-sided-error
property-tester for PD, which improves the one
obtained by Kohayakawa et al. We further prove a nearly matching
lower bound on the query complexity of such a property-tester.
Finally, we give a sufficient condition for inferring that
PD is not easily testable. Though our
results do not supply a complete characterization of the k-graphs
for which PD is easily testable, they are a natural
extension of the previous results about graphs (Alon, 2002).
Our proofs combine results and arguments from additive number
theory, linear algebra, and extremal hypergraph theory. We also
develop new techniques, which we believe are of independent
interest. The first is a construction of a dense set of integers
which does not contain a subset that satisfies a certain set of
linear equations. The second is an algebraic construction of certain
extremal hypergraphs. These techniques have already been applied in
two papers under publication by the authors.