546 research outputs found
Upper Tail Estimates with Combinatorial Proofs
We study generalisations of a simple, combinatorial proof of a Chernoff bound
similar to the one by Impagliazzo and Kabanets (RANDOM, 2010).
In particular, we prove a randomized version of the hitting property of
expander random walks and apply it to obtain a concentration bound for expander
random walks which is essentially optimal for small deviations and a large
number of steps. At the same time, we present a simpler proof that still yields
a "right" bound settling a question asked by Impagliazzo and Kabanets.
Next, we obtain a simple upper tail bound for polynomials with input
variables in which are not necessarily independent, but obey a certain
condition inspired by Impagliazzo and Kabanets. The resulting bound is used by
Holenstein and Sinha (FOCS, 2012) in the proof of a lower bound for the number
of calls in a black-box construction of a pseudorandom generator from a one-way
function.
We then show that the same technique yields the upper tail bound for the
number of copies of a fixed graph in an Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi random graph,
matching the one given by Janson, Oleszkiewicz and Ruci\'nski (Israel J. Math,
2002).Comment: Full version of the paper from STACS 201
High Dimensional Random Walks and Colorful Expansion
Random walks on bounded degree expander graphs have numerous applications,
both in theoretical and practical computational problems. A key property of
these walks is that they converge rapidly to their stationary distribution.
In this work we {\em define high order random walks}: These are
generalizations of random walks on graphs to high dimensional simplicial
complexes, which are the high dimensional analogues of graphs. A simplicial
complex of dimension has vertices, edges, triangles, pyramids, up to
-dimensional cells. For any , a high order random walk on
dimension moves between neighboring -faces (e.g., edges) of the complex,
where two -faces are considered neighbors if they share a common
-face (e.g., a triangle). The case of recovers the well studied
random walk on graphs.
We provide a {\em local-to-global criterion} on a complex which implies {\em
rapid convergence of all high order random walks} on it. Specifically, we prove
that if the -dimensional skeletons of all the links of a complex are
spectral expanders, then for {\em all} the high order random walk
on dimension converges rapidly to its stationary distribution.
We derive our result through a new notion of high dimensional combinatorial
expansion of complexes which we term {\em colorful expansion}. This notion is a
natural generalization of combinatorial expansion of graphs and is strongly
related to the convergence rate of the high order random walks.
We further show an explicit family of {\em bounded degree} complexes which
satisfy this criterion. Specifically, we show that Ramanujan complexes meet
this criterion, and thus form an explicit family of bounded degree high
dimensional simplicial complexes in which all of the high order random walks
converge rapidly to their stationary distribution.Comment: 27 page
A Matrix Expander Chernoff Bound
We prove a Chernoff-type bound for sums of matrix-valued random variables
sampled via a random walk on an expander, confirming a conjecture due to
Wigderson and Xiao. Our proof is based on a new multi-matrix extension of the
Golden-Thompson inequality which improves in some ways the inequality of
Sutter, Berta, and Tomamichel, and may be of independent interest, as well as
an adaptation of an argument for the scalar case due to Healy. Secondarily, we
also provide a generic reduction showing that any concentration inequality for
vector-valued martingales implies a concentration inequality for the
corresponding expander walk, with a weakening of parameters proportional to the
squared mixing time.Comment: Fixed a minor bug in the proof of Theorem 3.
Phase Transitions of Best-of-Two and Best-of-Three on Stochastic Block Models
This paper is concerned with voting processes on graphs where each vertex
holds one of two different opinions. In particular, we study the
\emph{Best-of-two} and the \emph{Best-of-three}. Here at each synchronous and
discrete time step, each vertex updates its opinion to match the majority among
the opinions of two random neighbors and itself (the Best-of-two) or the
opinions of three random neighbors (the Best-of-three). Previous studies have
explored these processes on complete graphs and expander graphs, but we
understand significantly less about their properties on graphs with more
complicated structures.
In this paper, we study the Best-of-two and the Best-of-three on the
stochastic block model , which is a random graph consisting of two
distinct Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi graphs joined by random edges with density
. We obtain two main results. First, if and
is a constant, we show that there is a phase transition in with
threshold (specifically, for the Best-of-two, and
for the Best-of-three). If , the process reaches consensus
within steps for any initial opinion
configuration with a bias of . By contrast, if , then there
exists an initial opinion configuration with a bias of from which
the process requires at least steps to reach consensus. Second,
if is a constant and , we show that, for any initial opinion
configuration, the process reaches consensus within steps. To the
best of our knowledge, this is the first result concerning multiple-choice
voting for arbitrary initial opinion configurations on non-complete graphs
Gap Amplification for Small-Set Expansion via Random Walks
In this work, we achieve gap amplification for the Small-Set Expansion
problem. Specifically, we show that an instance of the Small-Set Expansion
Problem with completeness and soundness is at least as
difficult as Small-Set Expansion with completeness and soundness
, for any function which grows faster than
. We achieve this amplification via random walks -- our gadget
is the graph with adjacency matrix corresponding to a random walk on the
original graph. An interesting feature of our reduction is that unlike gap
amplification via parallel repetition, the size of the instances (number of
vertices) produced by the reduction remains the same
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