Noisy Boolean Hidden Matching with Applications

The Boolean Hidden Matching (BHM) problem, introduced in a seminal paper of Gavinsky et al. [STOC'07], has played an important role in lower bounds for graph problems in the streaming model (e.g., subgraph counting, maximum matching, MAX-CUT, Schatten p-norm approximation). The BHM problem typically leads to Omega(root n) space lower bounds for constant factor approximations, with the reductions generating graphs that consist of connected components of constant size. The related Boolean Hidden Hypermatching (BHH) problem provides Omega(n(1-1/t)) lower bounds for 1 + O(1/t) approximation, for integers t >= 2. The corresponding reductions produce graphs with connected components of diameter about t, and essentially show that long range exploration is hard in the streaming model with an adversarial order of updates. In this paper we introduce a natural variant of the BHM problem, called noisy BHM (and its natural noisy BHH variant), that we use to obtain stronger than Omega(root n) lower bounds for approximating a number of the aforementioned problems in graph streams when the input graphs consist only of components of diameter bounded by a fixed constant. We next introduce and study the graph classification problem, where the task is to test whether the input graph is isomorphic to a given graph. As a first step, we use the noisy BHM problem to show that the problem of classifying whether an underlying graph is isomorphic to a complete binary tree in insertion-only streams requires Omega(n) space, which seems challenging to show using either BHM or BHH.