Introduction to Property Testing

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.

'The book is an authoritative source for information on property testing, having been written by an expert in the area who has been instrumental in its development … The book is laid out as a textbook, with plenty of exercises and didactic comments, and indeed it would form a good basis for a … postgraduate course on property testing … Researchers in other areas of algorithms and computational complexity theory will find the book useful as a source of concepts and techniques. It is also likely to serve as the standard reference text on property testing in the coming years.' Mark R. Jerrum, MathSciNet, 'Overall, the book is an excellent and comprehensive read. The range of topics discussed in this book is sufficient to attract many students to use it as reference. It can definitely be used as a reference to an advanced undergraduate level course or a beginning graduate level course.' Sarvagya Upadhyay, SIGACT News

Oded Goldreich is Professor of Computer Science at the Weizmann Institute of Science and holds the Meyer W. Weisgal Professorial Chair. He has made numerous contributions to property testing and to the theory of computation at large. He is the author of several books, including the two-volume Foundations of Cryptography (Cambridge, Vol. 1 2008, Vol. 2 2009) and Computational Complexity: A Conceptual Perspective (Cambridge, 2008). He is an associate editor of the journal Computational Complexity, former editor of the Journal of Cryptology and SIAM Journal on Computing, and has been invited to speak at numerous conferences, including the 1994 International Congress of Mathematicians. Oded Goldreich was awarded the 2017 Donald E. Knuth prize for outstanding contributions to the foundation of computer science.