Testability and local certification of monotone properties in minor-closed classes
Résumé
The main problem in the area of property testing is to understand which graph properties are \emph{testable}, which means that with constantly many queries to any input graph $G$, a tester can decide with good probability whether $G$ satisfies the property, or is far from satisfying the property. Testable properties are well understood in the dense model and in the bounded degree model, but little is known in sparse graph classes when graphs are allowed to have unbounded degree. This is the setting of the \emph{sparse model}. We prove that for any proper minor-closed class $\mathcal{G}$, any monotone property (i.e., any property that is closed under taking subgraphs) is testable for graphs from $\mathcal{G}$ in the sparse model. This extends a result of Czumaj and Sohler (FOCS'19), who proved it for monotone properties with finitely many obstructions. Our result implies for instance that for any integers $k$ and $t$, $k$-colorability of $K_t$-minor free graphs is testable in the sparse model. Elek recently proved that planarity of bounded degree graphs is almost locally checkable in constant time. We show again that the assumption of bounded degree can be omitted in his result.