English

Edge distribution in generalized graph products

Discrete Mathematics 2013-09-05 v4 Information Theory Combinatorics math.IT

Abstract

Given a graph G=(V,E)G=(V,E), an integer kk, and a function fG:Vk×Vk0,1f_G:V^k \times V^k \to {0,1}, the kthk^{th} graph product of GG w.r.t fGf_G is the graph with vertex set VkV^k, and an edge between two vertices x=(x1,...,xk)x=(x_1,...,x_k) and y=(y1,...,yk)y=(y_1,...,y_k) iff fG(x,y)=1f_G(x,y)=1. Graph products are a basic combinatorial object, widely studied and used in different areas such as hardness of approximation, information theory, etc. We study graph products for functions fGf_G of the form fG(x,y)=1f_G(x,y)=1 iff there are at least tt indices i[k]i \in [k] s.t. (xi,yi)E(x_i,y_i)\in E, where t[k]t \in [k] is a fixed parameter in fGf_G. This framework generalizes the well-known graph tensor-product (obtained for t=kt=k) and the graph or-product (obtained for t=1t=1). The property that interests us is the edge distribution in such graphs. We show that if GG has a spectral gap, then the number of edges connecting "large-enough" sets in GkG^k is "well-behaved", namely, it is close to the expected value, had the sets been random. We extend our results to bi-partite graph products as well. For a bi-partite graph G=(X,Y,E)G=(X,Y,E), the kthk^{th} bi-partite graph product of GG w.r.t fGf_G is the bi-partite graph with vertex sets XkX^k and YkY^k and edges between xXkx \in X^k and yYky \in Y^k iff fG(x,y)=1f_G(x,y)=1. Finally, for both types of graph products, optimality is asserted using the "Converse to the Expander Mixing Lemma" obtained by Bilu and Linial in 2006. A byproduct of our proof technique is a new explicit construction of a family of co-spectral graphs.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1211.1467,
  title  = {Edge distribution in generalized graph products},
  author = {Michael Langberg and Dan Vilenchik},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1211.1467},
  year   = {2013}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-21T22:34:09.683Z