2025/09/05 by Czumaj, Artur, Sohler, Christian, Walzer, Stefan
#Data Structures and Algorithms (cs.DS) #FOS: Computer and information sciences
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2509.05132
Property Testing is a formal framework to study the computational power and complexity of sampling from combinatorial objects. A central goal in standard graph property testing is to understand which graph properties are testable with sublinear query complexity. Here, a graph property P is testable with a sublinear query complexity if there is an algorithm that makes a sublinear number of queries to the input graph and accepts with probability at least 2/3, if the graph has property P, and rejects with probability at least 2/3 if it is ε-far from every graph that has property P. In this paper, we introduce a new variant of the bounded degree graph model. In this variant, in addition to the standard representation of a bounded degree graph, we assume that every vertex v has a unique label num(v) from \1, …, |V|\, and in addition to the standard queries in the bounded degree graph model, we also allow a property testing algorithm to query for the label of a vertex (but not for a vertex with a given label). Our new model is motivated by certain graph processes such as a DFS traversal, which assign consecutive numbers (labels) to the vertices of the graph. We want to study which of these numberings can be tested in sublinear time. As a first step in understanding such a model, we develop a property testing algorithm for discovery times of a DFS traversal with query complexity O(n1/3/ε) and for constant ε>0 we give a matching lower bound.