Every Testable (Infinite) Property of Bounded-Degree Graphs Contains an Infinite Hyperfinite Subproperty

Abstract

One of the most fundamental questions in graph property testing is to characterize the combinatorial structure of properties that are testable with a constant number of queries. We work towards an answer to this question for the bounded-degree graph model introduced in [Goldreich, Ron, 2002], where the input graphs have maximum degree bounded by a constant $d$. In this model, it is known (among other results) that every \emph{hyperfinite} property is constant-query testable [Newman, Sohler, 2013], where, informally, a graph property is hyperfinite, if for every $δ>0$ every graph in the property can be partitioned into small connected components by removing $δn$ edges. In this paper we show that hyperfiniteness plays a role in \emph{every} testable property, i.e. we show that every testable property is either finite (which trivially implies hyperfiniteness and testability) or contains an infinite hyperfinite subproperty. A simple consequence of our result is that no infinite graph property that only consists of expander graphs is constant-query testable. Based on the above findings, one could ask if every infinite testable non-hyperfinite property might contain an infinite family of expander (or near-expander) graphs. We show that this is not true. Motivated by our counter-example we develop a theorem that shows that we can partition the set of vertices of every bounded degree graph into a constant number of subsets and a separator set, such that the separator set is small and the distribution of $k$-disks on every subset of a partition class, is roughly the same as that of the partition class if the subset has small expansion.