Expander mixing

lemma

The expander mixing lemma intuitively

states that the edges of certain -regular
graphs are evenly distributed throughout
the graph. In particular, the number of
edges between two vertex subsets and
is always close to the expected number
of edges between them in a random -

regular graph, namely .

-Regular Expander Graphs

Define an -graph to be a -regular
graph on vertices such that all of the
eigenvalues of its adjacency matrix
except one have magnitude at most
The -regularity of the graph guarantees
that its largest-magnitude eigenvalue is
In fact, the all-1's vector is an
eigenvector of with eigenvalue , and
the eigenvectors of the adjacency matrix
will never exceed the maximum degree of
in magnitude.

If we fix and then -graphs

form a family of expander graphs with a
constant spectral gap.

Statement
Let be an -graph.
For any two subsets , let

be the number of edges between S and T

(counting edges contained in the
intersection of S and T twice). Then
Tighter Bound …

We can in fact show that

using similar techniques.[1]

Biregular Graphs …

For biregular graphs, we have the following

variation.[2]
Let be a bipartite graph
such that every vertex in is adjacent to
vertices of and every vertex in is
adjacent to vertices of . Let
with and
. Let . Then

Note that is the largest absolute

value of the eigenvalues of .

Proofs

Proof of First Statement …

Let be the adjacency matrix of and
let be the eigenvalues of
(these eigenvalues are real because
is symmetric). We know that
with corresponding eigenvector

, the normalization of the all-

1's vector. Because is symmetric, we

can pick eigenvectors of
corresponding to eigenvalues
so that forms an
orthonormal basis of .

Let be the matrix of all 1's. Note

that is an eigenvector of with
eigenvalue and each other , being
perpendicular to , is an eigenvector
of with eigenvalue 0. For a vertex subset
, let be the column vector with
coordinate equal to 1 if and 0
otherwise. Then,

Let . Because and

share eigenvectors, the eigenvalues of

are . By the Cauchy-
Schwarz inequality, we have that
. Furthermore, because is self-adjoint,
we can write

This implies that and

Proof Sketch of Tighter Bound …

To show the tighter bound above, we

instead consider the vectors

and , which are both

perpendicular to . We can expand

because the other two terms of the

expansion are zero. The first term is equal

to , so we

find that
We can bound the right hand side by

using the same methods as in the earlier

proof.

Applications
The expander mixing lemma can be used
to upper bound the size of an independent
set within a graph. In particular, the size of
an independent set in an -graph
is at most This is proved by letting
in the statement above and using
the fact that
An additional consequence is that, if is
an -graph, then its chromatic
number is at least This is
because, in a valid graph coloring, the set
of vertices of a given color is an
independent set. By the above fact, each
independent set has size at most
so at least such sets are needed to
cover all of the vertices.

A second application of the expander

mixing lemma is to provide an upper
bound on the maximum possible size of
an independent set within a polarity graph.
Given a finite projective plane with a
polarity the polarity graph is a bipartite
graph where the vertices are the points
and lines of , and vertices and are
connected if and only if In
particular, if has order then the
expander mixing lemma can show that an
independent set in the polarity graph can
have size at most
a bound proved by Hobart and Williford.

Converse
Bilu and Linial showed[3] that a converse
holds as well: if a -regular graph
satisfies that for any two
subsets with we
have
then its second-largest (in absolute value)
eigenvalue is bounded by
.

Generalization to
hypergraphs
Friedman and Widgerson proved the
following generalization of the mixing
lemma to hypergraphs.

Let be a -uniform hypergraph, i.e. a

hypergraph in which every "edge" is a tuple
of vertices. For any choice of subsets
of vertices,

Notes
1. Vadhan, Salil (Spring 2009). "Expander
Graphs" (PDF). Harvard University.
Retrieved December 1, 2019.
2. See Theorem 5.1 in "Interlacing
Eigenvalues and Graphs" by Haemers
3. Expander mixing lemma converse

References
Alon, N.; Chung, F. R. K. (1988), "Explicit
construction of linear sized tolerant
networks", Discrete Mathematics, 72 (1–
3): 15–19, doi:10.1016/0012-
365X(88)90189-6 .
Haemers, W. H. (1979). Eigenvalue
Techniques in Design and Graph Theory
(PDF) (Ph.D.).

Haemers, W. H. (1995), "Interlacing

Eigenvalues and Graphs", Linear Algebra
Appl., 226: 593–616, doi:10.1016/0024-
3795(95)00199-2 .
Hoory, S.; Linial, N.; Wigderson, A.
(2006), "Expander Graphs and their
Applications" (PDF), Bull. Amer. Math.
Soc. (N.S.), 43 (4): 439–561,
 doi:10.1090/S0273-0979-06-01126-8 .
Friedman, J.; Widgerson, A. (1995), "On
the second eigenvalue of hypergraphs"
(PDF), Combinatorica, 15 (1): 43–65,
doi:10.1007/BF01294459 .

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