Testing (subclasses of) halfspaces
Author(s)
Matulef, Kevin M.; O'Donnell, Ryan; Rubinfeld, Ronitt; Servedio, Rocco
Downloadtmpl.pdf (236.4Kb)
OPEN_ACCESS_POLICY
Open Access Policy
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Terms of use
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
We address the problem of testing whether a Boolean-valued function f is a halfspace, i.e. a function of the form f(x) = sgn(w . x − θ). We consider halfspaces over the continuous domain R n (endowed with the standard multivariate Gaussian distribution) as well as halfspaces over the Boolean cube { − 1,1} n (endowed with the uniform distribution). In both cases we give an algorithm that distinguishes halfspaces from functions that are ε-far from any halfspace using only poly(1) queries, independent of the dimension n.
In contrast to the case of general halfspaces, we show that testing natural subclasses of halfspaces can be markedly harder; for the class of { − 1,1}-weight halfspaces, we show that a tester must make at least Ω(logn) queries. We complement this lower bound with an upper bound showing that O(√n) queries suffice.
Date issued
2010-01Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer ScienceJournal
Proceedings of the ITCS Mini-workshop on Property Testing (2010 : Beijing, China)
Publisher
Springer-Verlag
Citation
Matulef, Kevin et al. “Testing (Subclasses of) Halfspaces.” Property Testing. Ed. Oded Goldreich. (Lecture Notes in Computer Science : Vol. 6390). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2010. 334–340.
Version: Author's final manuscript
ISBN
978-3-642-16366-1