A Characterization of the (natural) Graph Properties Testable with One-Sided Error

Abstract

The problem of characterizing all the testable graph properties is considered by many to be the most important open problem in the area of property-testing. Our main result in this paper is a solution of an important special case of this general problem; Call a property tester oblivious if its decisions are independent of the size of the input graph. We show that a graph property P has an oblivious one-sided error tester, if and only if P is (semi) hereditary. We stress that any natural property that can be tested (either with one-sided or with two-sided error) can be tested by an oblivious tester In particular, all the testers studied thus far in the literature were oblivious. Our main result can thus be considered as a precise characterization of the natural graph properties, which are testable with one-sided error. One of the main technical contributions of this paper is in showing that any hereditary graph property can be tested with one-sided error. This general result contains as a special case all the previous results about testing graph properties with one-sided error. These include the results of Goldreich et al., [1998] about testing k-colorability, the characterization of Goldreich and Trevisan [2001] of the graph-partition problems that are testable with 1-sided error, the induced vertex colorability properties of Alon et al., [2000], the induced edge colorability properties of Fischer [2001], a transformation from 2-sided to 1-sided error testing [Goldreich and Trevisan, 2001], as well as a recent result about testing monotone graph properties [Alon and Shapira, 2005]. More importantly, as a special case of our main result, we infer that some of the most well studied graph properties, both in graph theory and computer science, are testable with one-sided error. Some of these properties are the well known graph properties of being perfect, chordal, interval, comparability and more. None of these properties was previously known to be testable.