We derandomize G. Valiant's [J. ACM 62 (2015) Art. 13] subquadratic-time algorithm for finding outlier correlations in binary data. Our derandomized algorithm gives deterministic subquadratic scaling essentially for the same parameter range as Valiant's randomized algorithm, but the precise constants we save over quadratic scaling are more modest. Our main technical tool for derandomization is an explicit family of correlation amplifiers built via a family of zigzag-product expanders in Reingold, Vadhan, and Wigderson [Ann. of Math. 155 (2002) 157--187]. We say that a function @math is a correlation amplifier with threshold @math , error @math , and strength @math an even positive integer if for all pairs of vectors @math it holds that (i) @math implies @math ; and (ii) @math implies @math .
G. Valiant @cite_27 showed that a randomized algorithm can identify the planted correlation in subquadratic time on almost all inputs even when @math tends to zero as @math increases. As a corollary of thm:algorithm , we can derandomize Valiant's design and still retain subquadratic running time (but with a worse constant) for almost all inputs, except for extremely weak planted correlations with @math that our amplifier is not in general able to amplify with sufficiently low output dimension to enable an overall subquadratic running time.
@cite_27
2950319503 2952901144 2082227928 91979434
We present an algorithm for recovering planted solutions in two well-known models, the stochastic block model and planted constraint satisfaction problems, via a common generalization in terms of random bipartite graphs. Our algorithm matches up to a constant factor the best-known bounds for the number of edges (or constraints) needed for perfect recovery and its running time is linear in the number of edges used. The time complexity is significantly better than both spectral and SDP-based approaches. The main contribution of the algorithm is in the case of unequal sizes in the bipartition (corresponding to odd uniformity in the CSP). Here our algorithm succeeds at a significantly lower density than the spectral approaches, surpassing a barrier based on the spectral norm of a random matrix. Other significant features of the algorithm and analysis include (i) the critical use of power iteration with subsampling, which might be of independent interest; its analysis requires keeping track of multiple norms of an evolving solution (ii) it can be implemented statistically, i.e., with very limited access to the input distribution (iii) the algorithm is extremely simple to implement and runs in linear time, and thus is practical even for very large instances. We consider two closely related problems: planted clustering and submatrix localization. The planted clustering problem assumes that a random graph is generated based on some underlying clusters of the nodes; the task is to recover these clusters given the graph. The submatrix localization problem concerns locating hidden submatrices with elevated means inside a large real-valued random matrix. Of particular interest is the setting where the number of clusters submatrices is allowed to grow unbounded with the problem size. These formulations cover several classical models such as planted clique, planted densest subgraph, planted partition, planted coloring, and stochastic block model, which are widely used for studying community detection and clustering bi-clustering. For both problems, we show that the space of the model parameters (cluster submatrix size, cluster density, and submatrix mean) can be partitioned into four disjoint regions corresponding to decreasing statistical and computational complexities: (1) the regime, where all algorithms fail; (2) the regime, where the computationally expensive Maximum Likelihood Estimator (MLE) succeeds; (3) the regime, where the polynomial-time convexified MLE succeeds; (4) the regime, where a simple counting thresholding procedure succeeds. Moreover, we show that each of these algorithms provably fails in the previous harder regimes. Our theorems establish the minimax recovery limit, which are tight up to constants and hold with a growing number of clusters submatrices, and provide a stronger performance guarantee than previously known for polynomial-time algorithms. Our study demonstrates the tradeoffs between statistical and computational considerations, and suggests that the minimax recovery limit may not be achievable by polynomial-time algorithms. We present a probabilistic algorithm that, given a connected graph G (represented by adjacency lists) of average degree d, with edge weights in the set 1,...,w , and given a parameter @math , estimates in time @math the weight of the minimum spanning tree (MST) of G with a relative error of at most @math . Note that the running time does not depend on the number of vertices in G. We also prove a nearly matching lower bound of @math on the probe and time complexity of any approximation algorithm for MST weight. The essential component of our algorithm is a procedure for estimating in time @math the number of connected components of an unweighted graph to within an additive error of @math . (This becomes @math for @math .) The time bound is shown to be tight up to within the @math factor. Our connected-components algorithm picks @math vertices in the graph and then grows "local spanning trees" whose sizes are specified by a stochastic process. From the local information collected in this way, the algorithm is able to infer, with high confidence, an estimate of the number of connected components. We then show how estimates on the number of components in various subgraphs of G can be used to estimate the weight of its MST. Recently Bogdanov and Viola (FOCS 2007) and Lovett (ECCC-07) constructed pseudorandom generators that fool degree k polynomials over F2 for an arbitrary constant k. We show that such generators can also be used to fool branching programs of width 2 and polynomial length that read k bits of inputs at a time. This model generalizes polynomials of degree k over F2 and includes some other interesting classes of functions, for instance k-DNF. The constructions of Bogdanov and Viola and Lovett consist of adding a constant number of independent copies of a generator that fools linear functions (an -biased set). It is natural to ask, in light of our first result, whether such generators can fool branching programs of width larger than 2. Our second result is a lower bound showing