Explicit Construction of a Small Epsilon-Net for Linear Threshold Functions

We give explicit constructions of $\epsilon$-nets for linear threshold functions on the binary cube and on the unit sphere. The size of the constructed nets is polynomial in the dimension $n$ and in $\frac{1}{\epsilon}$. To the best of our knowledge no such constructions were previously known. Our results match, up to the exponent of the polynomial, the bounds that are achieved by probabilistic arguments. As a corollary we also construct subsets of the binary cube that have size polynomial in $n$ and a covering radius of $\frac{n}{2}-c\sqrt{n\log n}$ for any constant $c$. This improves upon the well-known construction of dual BCH codes that guarantee only a covering radius of $\frac{n}{2}-c\sqrt{n}$.

[1]  Noam Nisan,et al.  Approximations of general independent distributions , 1992, STOC '92.

[2]  David L Donoho,et al.  Compressed sensing , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.

[3]  Bernard Chazelle,et al.  Computational geometry: a retrospective , 1994, STOC '94.

[4]  Jiri Matousek,et al.  Lectures on discrete geometry , 2002, Graduate texts in mathematics.

[5]  Emanuele Viola The Sum of d Small-Bias Generators Fools Polynomials of Degree d , 2008, Computational Complexity Conference.

[6]  Jeanette P. Schmidt,et al.  The analysis of closed hashing under limited randomness , 1990, STOC '90.

[7]  Noga Alon,et al.  The Probabilistic Method , 2015, Fundamentals of Ramsey Theory.

[8]  Noga Alon,et al.  Derandomized graph products , 1995, computational complexity.

[9]  Noga Alon,et al.  Weak ε-nets and interval chains , 2008, SODA '08.

[10]  Noam Nisan,et al.  Velickovic approximations of general independent distributions , 1992, Symposium on the Theory of Computing.

[11]  Moni Naor,et al.  Small-Bias Probability Spaces: Efficient Constructions and Applications , 1993, SIAM J. Comput..

[12]  Emmanuel J. Candès,et al.  Near-Optimal Signal Recovery From Random Projections: Universal Encoding Strategies? , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.

[13]  Bonnie Berger,et al.  The fourth moment method , 1991, SODA '91.

[14]  Noga Alon,et al.  Algorithms with large domination ratio , 2004, J. Algorithms.

[15]  Michael E. Saks,et al.  Efficient construction of a small hitting set for combinatorial rectangles in high dimension , 1997, Comb..

[16]  Venkatesan Guruswami,et al.  Euclidean Sections of with Sublinear Randomness and Error-Correction over the Reals , 2008, APPROX-RANDOM.

[17]  Piotr Indyk,et al.  Uncertainty principles, extractors, and explicit embeddings of l2 into l1 , 2007, STOC '07.

[18]  D. Sivakumar Algorithmic derandomization via complexity theory , 2002, STOC '02.

[19]  János Komlós,et al.  Storing a sparse table with O(1) worst case access time , 1982, 23rd Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (sfcs 1982).

[20]  James R. Lee,et al.  Almost Euclidean subspaces of e N 1 via expander codes , 2008, SODA 2008.

[21]  Larry Carter,et al.  Universal Classes of Hash Functions , 1979, J. Comput. Syst. Sci..

[22]  Ryan O'Donnell,et al.  Derandomized dimensionality reduction with applications , 2002, SODA '02.