Introduction to Property Testing

Book excerpt: Property testing is concerned with the design of super-fast algorithms for the structural analysis of large quantities of data. The aim is to unveil global features of the data, such as determining whether the data has a particular property or estimating global parameters. Remarkably, it is possible for decisions to be made by accessing only a small portion of the data. Property testing focuses on properties and parameters that go beyond simple statistics. This book provides an extensive and authoritative introduction to property testing. It provides a wide range of algorithmic techniques for the design and analysis of tests for algebraic properties, properties of Boolean functions, graph properties, and properties of distributions.