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Paper

TESTING March 24, 2026

Testing Properties of Edge Distributions

Authors

Yumou Fei

Abstract

We initiate the study of distribution testing for probability distributions over the edges of a graph, motivated by the closely related question of ``edge-distribution-free'' graph property testing. The main results of this paper are nearly-tight bounds on testing bipartiteness, triangle-freeness and square-freeness of edge distributions, whose sample complexities are shown to scale as $Θ(n)$, $n^{4/3\pm o(1)}$ and $n^{9/8\pm o(1)}$, respectively. The technical core of our paper lies in the proof of the upper bound for testing square-freeness, wherein we develop new techniques based on certain birthday-paradox-type lemmas that may be of independent interest. We will discuss how our techniques fit into the general framework of distribution-free property testing. We will also discuss how our results are conceptually connected with Turán problems and subgraph removal lemmas in extremal combinatorics.

Metadata

arXiv ID: 2603.22702
Provider: ARXIV
Primary Category: cs.DS
Published: 2026-03-24
Fetched: 2026-03-25 06:02

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Raw Data (Debug)
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