Approximate Hypergraph Partitioning and Applications

We show that any partition-problem of hypergraphs has an O(n) time approximate partitioning algorithm and an efficient property tester. This extends the results of Goldreich, Goldwasser and Ron who obtained similar algorithms for the special case of graph partition problems in their seminal paper (1998). The partitioning algorithm is used to obtain the following results: ldr We derive a surprisingly simple O(n) time algorithmic version of Szemeredi´s regularity lemma. Unlike all the previous approaches for this problem which only guaranteed to find partitions of tower-size, our algorithm will find a small regular partition in the case that one exists; ldr For any r ges 3, we give an O(n) time randomized algorithm for constructing regular partitions of r-uniform hypergraphs, thus improving the previous O(n^2r-1) time (deterministic) algorithms. The property testing algorithm is used to unify several previous results, and to obtain the partition densities for the above problems (rather than the partitions themselves) using only poly(1/isin) queries and constant running time.