The Sketching Complexity of Graph Cuts
summary
Claim: any graph-format sparsifier that preserves all cuts needs n/ε^2 lower bound edges, but allowing a non-graph sketch of size O(n/ε polylog n) with a per-query high‑probability guarantee reduces the dependence to 1/ε. Construction: downsample edges by ≈1/(ε^2·v), perform a recursive sparse-cut decomposition, store cross‑cut edges exactly, store degrees and one/ε sampled outgoing edges per vertex; estimator uses degrees minus sampled internal edges to cut variance. Proof of the lower bound uses a communication‑complexity reduction (the Index‑Gap‑Hamming reduction). Application: composable sketches for global minimum cut.
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chapters (20)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:35Graph compression
- 2:40Problem definition
- 4:00Cut sparsifiers: constructions
- 5:04Dependence on a ?
- 6:55Our results
- 9:40Motivating example
- 19:16ii Sketch size
- 21:55iii Estimation
- 24:05Estimation illustration
- 29:21iii Correctness
- 31:09Why not cross-cut edges?
- 34:21Inside-edges estimate
- 36:16Wrap-up of upper bound
- 39:39An application
- 41:00Sketching for global min-cut
- 45:11Lower Bound
- 46:55Proof outline
- 53:20Index(Gap-Ham) via cut-sketch H
- 58:20Intuition
