Randomized matrix sparsification has proven to be a fruitful technique for producing faster algorithms in applications ranging from graph partitioning to semidefinite programming. In the decade or so of research into this technique, the focus has been—with few exceptions—on ensuring the quality of approximation in the spectral and Frobenius norms. For certain graph algorithms, however, the ∞→1 norm may be a more natural measure of performance. This paper addresses the problem of approximating a real matrix A by a sparse random matrix X with respect to several norms. It provides the first results on approximation error in the ∞→1 and ∞→2 norms, and it uses a result of Lata la to study approximation error in the spectral norm. These bounds hold for a reasonable family of random sparsification schemes, those which ensure that the entries of X are independent and average to the corresponding entries of A. Optimality of the ∞→1 and ∞→2 error estimates is established. Concentration results for the three norms hold when the entries of X are uniformly bounded. The spectral error bound is used to predict the performance of several sparsification and quantization schemes that have appeared in the literature; the results are competitive with the performance guarantees given by earlier scheme-specific analyses.
The cut-norm ||A|| C of a real matrix A=(a ij ) i∈ R,j∈S is the maximum, over all I ⊂ R, J ⊂ S of the quantity | Σ i ∈ I, j ∈ J a ij |. This concept plays a major role in the design of efficient approximation algorithms for dense graph and matrix problems. Here we show that the problem of approximating the cut-norm of a given real matrix is MAX SNP hard, and provide an efficient approximation algorithm. This algorithm finds, for a given matrix A=(a ij ) i ∈ R, j ∈ S , two subsets I ⊂ R and J ⊂ S, such that | Σ i ∈ I, j ∈ J a ij | ≥ ρ ||A|| C , where ρ > 0 is an absolute constant satisfying $ρ > 0. 56. The algorithm combines semidefinite programming with a rounding technique based on Grothendieck's Inequality. We present three known proofs of Grothendieck's inequality, with the necessary modifications which emphasize their algorithmic aspects. These proofs contain rounding techniques which go beyond the random hyperplane rounding of Goemans and Williamson [12], allowing us to transfer various algorithms for dense graph and matrix problems to the sparse case.