Parameterized Property Testing of Functions

We investigate the parameters in terms of which the complexity of sublinear-time algorithms should be expressed. Our goal is to find input parameters that are tailored to the combinatorics of the specific problem being studied and design algorithms that run faster when these parameters are small. This direction enables us to surpass the (worst-case) lower bounds, expressed in terms of the input size, for several problems. Our aim is to develop a similar level of understanding of the complexity of sublinear-time algorithms to the one that was enabled by research in parameterized complexity for classical algorithms. Specifically, we focus on testing properties of functions. By parameterizing the query complexity in terms of the size r of the image of the input function, we obtain testers for monotonicity and convexity of functions of the form f:[n]to mathbb{R} with query complexity O(log r), with no dependence on n. The result for monotonicity circumvents the Omega(log n) lower bound by Fischer (Inf. Comput., 2004) for this problem. We present several other parameterized testers, providing compelling evidence that expressing the query complexity of property testers in terms of the input size is not always the best choice

Erasure-Resilient Sublinear-Time Graph Algorithms

We investigate sublinear-time algorithms that take partially erased graphs represented by adjacency lists as input. Our algorithms make degree and neighbor queries to the input graph and work with a specified fraction of adversarial erasures in adjacency entries. We focus on two computational tasks: testing if a graph is connected or ?-far from connected and estimating the average degree. For testing connectedness, we discover a threshold phenomenon: when the fraction of erasures is less than ?, this property can be tested efficiently (in time independent of the size of the graph); when the fraction of erasures is at least ?, then a number of queries linear in the size of the graph representation is required. Our erasure-resilient algorithm (for the special case with no erasures) is an improvement over the previously known algorithm for connectedness in the standard property testing model and has optimal dependence on the proximity parameter ?. For estimating the average degree, our results provide an "interpolation" between the query complexity for this computational task in the model with no erasures in two different settings: with only degree queries, investigated by Feige (SIAM J. Comput. `06), and with degree queries and neighbor queries, investigated by Goldreich and Ron (Random Struct. Algorithms `08) and Eden et al. (ICALP `17). We conclude with a discussion of our model and open questions raised by our work

Optimal Unateness Testers for Real-Valued Functions: Adaptivity Helps

We study the problem of testing unateness of functions f:{0,1}^d -> R. We give an O(d/epsilon . log(d/epsilon))-query nonadaptive tester and an O(d/epsilon)-query adaptive tester and show that both testers are optimal for a fixed distance parameter epsilon. Previously known unateness testers worked only for Boolean functions, and their query complexity had worse dependence on the dimension both for the adaptive and the nonadaptive case. Moreover, no lower bounds for testing unateness were known. We generalize our results to obtain optimal unateness testers for functions f:[n]^d -> R. Our results establish that adaptivity helps with testing unateness of real-valued functions on domains of the form {0,1}^d and, more generally, [n]^d. This stands in contrast to the situation for monotonicity testing where there is no adaptivity gap for functions f:[n]^d -> R