A Boolean function is called read-once over a basis B if it can be expressed by a formula over B where no variable appears more than once. A checking test for a read-once function f over B depending on all its variables is a set of input vectors distinguishing f from all other read-once functions of the same variables. We show that every read-once function f over B has a checking test containing O(n^l) vectors, where n is the number of relevant variables of f and l is the largest arity of functions in B. For some functions, this bound cannot be improved by more than a constant factor. The employed technique involves reconstructing f from its l-variable projections and provides a stronger form of Kuznetsov's classic theorem on read-once representations.
Another appealing problem is that of obtaining bounds on the value of @math for individual read-once functions @math . The bound @math is obtained in @cite_10 and generalized in @cite_13 . @cite_2 , it is shown that for a wide class of bases including @math , @math , there exist pairs of read-once functions @math such that @math is obtained from @math by substituting a constant for a variable and @math . This result shows that lower bounds on @math cannot generally be obtained by simply finding projections of @math that are already known to require a large number of vectors in their checking tests.
@cite_13 @cite_10 @cite_2
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We investigate the approximability of several classes of real-valued functions by functions of a small number of variables ( juntas ). Our main results are tight bounds on the number of variables required to approximate a function @math within @math -error @math over the uniform distribution: 1. If @math is submodular, then it is @math -close to a function of @math variables. This is an exponential improvement over previously known results. We note that @math variables are necessary even for linear functions. 2. If @math is fractionally subadditive (XOS) it is @math -close to a function of @math variables. This result holds for all functions with low total @math -influence and is a real-valued analogue of Friedgut's theorem for boolean functions. We show that @math variables are necessary even for XOS functions. As applications of these results, we provide learning algorithms over the uniform distribution. For XOS functions, we give a PAC learning algorithm that runs in time @math . For submodular functions we give an algorithm in the more demanding PMAC learning model (Balcan and Harvey, 2011) which requires a multiplicative @math factor approximation with probability at least @math over the target distribution. Our uniform distribution algorithm runs in time @math . This is the first algorithm in the PMAC model that over the uniform distribution can achieve a constant approximation factor arbitrarily close to 1 for all submodular functions. As follows from the lower bounds in (, 2013) both of these algorithms are close to optimal. We also give applications for proper learning, testing and agnostic learning with value queries of these classes. Motivated by the problem of querying and communicating bidders' valuations in combinatorial auctions, we study how well different classes of set functions can be sketched. More formally, let f be a function mapping subsets of some ground set [n] to the non-negative real numbers. We say that f' is an α-sketch of f if for every set S, the value f'(S) lies between f(S) α and f(S), and f' can be specified by poly(n) bits. We show that for every subadditive function f there exists an α-sketch where α = n1 2. O(polylog(n)). Furthermore, we provide an algorithm that finds these sketches with a polynomial number of demand queries. This is essentially the best we can hope for since: 1. We show that there exist subadditive functions (in fact, XOS functions) that do not admit an o(n1 2) sketch. (Balcan and Harvey [3] previously showed that there exist functions belonging to the class of substitutes valuations that do not admit an O(n1 3) sketch.) 2. We prove that every deterministic algorithm that accesses the function via value queries only cannot guarantee a sketching ratio better than n1−e. We also show that coverage functions, an interesting subclass of submodular functions, admit arbitrarily good sketches. Finally, we show an interesting connection between sketching and learning. We show that for every class of valuations, if the class admits an α-sketch, then it can be α-approximately learned in the PMAC model of Balcan and Harvey. The bounds we prove are only information-theoretic and do not imply the existence of computationally efficient learning algorithms in general. We develop fast and memory efficient numerical methods for learning functions of many variables that admit sparse representations in terms of general bounded orthonormal tensor product bases. Such functions appear in many applications including, e.g., various Uncertainty Quantification(UQ) problems involving the solution of parametric PDE that are approximately sparse in Chebyshev or Legendre product bases. We expect that our results provide a starting point for a new line of research on sublinear-time solution techniques for UQ applications of the type above which will eventually be able to scale to significantly higher-dimensional problems than what are currently computationally feasible. More concretely, let @math be a finite Bounded Orthonormal Product Basis (BOPB) of cardinality @math . We will develop methods that approximate any function @math that is sparse in the BOPB, that is, @math of the form @math with @math of cardinality @math . Our method has a runtime of just @math , uses only @math function evaluations on a fixed and nonadaptive grid, and not more than @math bits of memory. For @math , the runtime @math will be less than what is required to simply enumerate the elements of the basis @math ; thus our method is the first approach applicable in a general BOPB framework that falls into the class referred to as "sublinear-time". This and the similarly reduced sample and memory requirements set our algorithm apart from previous works based on standard compressive sensing algorithms such as basis pursuit which typically store and utilize full intermediate basis representations of size @math . We consider the problem of private information retrieval (PIR) from @math non-colluding and replicated databases when the user is equipped with a cache that holds an uncoded fraction @math from each of the @math stored messages in the databases. We assume that the databases are unaware of the cache content. We investigate @math the optimal download cost normalized with the message size as a function of @math , @math , @math . For a fixed @math , @math , we develop an inner bound (converse bound) for the @math curve. The inner bound is a piece-wise linear function in @math that consists of @math line segments. For the achievability, we develop explicit schemes that exploit the cached bits as side information to achieve @math non-degenerate corner points. These corner points differ in the number of cached bits that are used to generate one side information equation. We obtain an outer bound (achievability) for any caching ratio by memory-sharing between these corner points. Thus, the outer bound is also a piece-wise linear function in @math that consists of @math line segments. The inner and the outer bounds match in general for the cases of very low caching ratio ( @math ) and very high caching ratio ( @math ). As a corollary, we fully characterize the optimal download cost caching ratio tradeoff for @math . For general @math , @math , and @math , we show that the largest gap between the achievability and the converse bounds is @math . Our results show that the download cost can be reduced beyond memory-sharing if the databases are unaware of the cached content.