We study sublinear algorithms for two fundamental graph problems, MAXCUT and correlation clustering. Our focus is on constructing core-sets as well as developing streaming algorithms for these problems. Constant space algorithms are known for dense graphs for these problems, while $Ω(n)$ lower bounds exist (in the streaming setting) for sparse graphs. Our goal in this paper is to bridge the gap between these extremes. Our first result is to construct core-sets of size $\tilde{O}(n^{1-δ})$ for both the problems, on graphs with average degree $n^δ$ (for any $δ>0$). This turns out to be optimal, under the exponential time hypothesis (ETH). Our core-set analysis is based on studying random-induced sub-problems of optimization problems. To the best of our knowledge, all the known results in our parameter range rely crucially on near-regularity assumptions. We avoid these by using a biased sampling approach, which we analyze using recent results on concentration of quadratic functions. We then show that our construction yields a 2-pass streaming $(1+ε)$-approximation for both problems; the algorithm uses $\tilde{O}(n^{1-δ})$ space, for graphs of average degree $n^δ$.

Streaming interactive proofs (SIPs) are a framework for outsourced computation. A computationally limited streaming client (the verifier) hands over a large data set to an untrusted server (the prover) in the cloud and the two parties run a protocol to confirm the correctness of result with high probability. SIPs are particularly interesting for problems that are hard to solve (or even approximate) well in a streaming setting. The most notable of these problems is finding maximum matchings, which has received intense interest in recent years but has strong lower bounds even for constant factor approximations. In this paper, we present efficient streaming interactive proofs that can verify maximum matchings exactly. Our results cover all flavors of matchings (bipartite/non-bipartite and weighted). In addition, we also present streaming verifiers for approximate metric TSP. In particular, these are the first efficient results for weighted matchings and for metric TSP in any streaming verification model.

We study coresets for various types of range counting queries on uncertain data. In our model each uncertain point has a probability density describing its location, sometimes defined as k distinct locations. Our goal is to construct a subset of the uncertain points, including their locational uncertainty, so that range counting queries can be answered by just examining this subset. We study three distinct types of queries. RE queries return the expected number of points in a query range. RC queries return the number of points in the range with probability at least a threshold. RQ queries returns the probability that fewer than some threshold fraction of the points are in the range. In both RC and RQ coresets the threshold is provided as part of the query. And for each type of query we provide coreset constructions with approximation-size tradeoffs. We show that random sampling can be used to construct each type of coreset, and we also provide significantly improved bounds using discrepancy-based approaches on axis-aligned range queries.