TESTING EMBEDDABILITY BETWEEN METRIC SPACES

Abstract

Let L ≥ 1, ε > 0 be real numbers, (M, d) be a finite metric space and (N, ρ) be a metric space. A query to a metric space consists of a pair of points and asks for the distance between these points. We study the number of queries to metric spaces (M, d) and (N, ρ) needed to decide whether (M, d) is L-bilipschitz embeddable into (N, ρ) or ∊-far from being L-bilipschitz embeddable into N, ρ). When (M, d) is ∊-far from being L-bilipschitz embeddable into (N, ρ), we allow an o(1) probability of error (i.e., returning the wrong answer "L-bilipschitz embeddable"). However, no error is allowed when (M, d) is L-bilipschitz embeddable into (N, ρ). That is, algorithms with only one-sided errors are studied in this paper. When |M| ≤ |N| are both finite, we give an upper bound of [Formula: see text] on the number of queries for determining with one-sided error whether (M, d) is L-bilipschitz embeddable into (N, ρ) or ∊-far from being L-bilipschitz embeddable into (N, ρ). For the special case of finite |M| = |N|, the above upper bound evaluates to [Formula: see text]. We also prove a lower bound of Ω(|N|3/2) for the special case when |M| = |N| are finite and L = 1, which coincides with testing isometry between finite metric spaces. For finite |M| = |N|, the upper and lower bounds thus match up to a multiplicative factor of at most [Formula: see text], which depends only sublogarithmically in |N|. We also investigate the case when (N, ρ) is not necessarily finite. Our results are based on techniques developed in an earlier work on testing graph isomorphism.