Testing Fourier dimensionality and sparsity.
P. Gopalan and R. O'Donnell and R. Servedio and A. Shpilka and K. Wimmer.
36th International Conference on Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP), 2009, p. 500-512.


Abstract:

We present a range of new results for testing properties of Boolean functions that are defined in terms of the Fourier spectrum. Broadly speaking, our results show that the property of a Boolean function having a concise Fourier representation is locally testable.

We first give an efficient algorithm for testing whether the Fourier spectrum of a Boolean function is supported in a low-dimensional subspace of $\F_2^n$ (equivalently, for testing whether $f$ is a junta over a small number of parities). We next give an efficient algorithm for testing whether a Boolean function has a sparse Fourier spectrum (small number of nonzero coefficients). In both cases we also prove lower bounds showing that any testing algorithm --- even an adaptive one --- must have query complexity within a polynomial factor of our algorithms, which are nonadaptive. Finally, we give an ``implicit learning'' algorithm that lets us test \emph{any} sub-property of Fourier concision.

Our technical contributions include new structural results about sparse Boolean functions and new analysis of the pairwise independent hashing of Fourier coefficients from~\cite{FGK+:06}.


Postscript or pdf (full version).


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