## Tuesday, January 30, 2007

### Boosting the correctness probability in testing

In defining what it means to be a tester $T$ for property $\mathcal{P}$, I wrote: if $f$ satisfies $\mathcal{P}$ then Pr[$T(f)$ accepts] $> 2/3$ and if $f$ is $\epsilon$-far from satisfying $\mathcal{P}$ then Pr[$T(f)$ accepts] $< 1/3$. I then added that the $2/3$ and $1/3$ here is "arbitrary" and could be "boosted".

This phrasing is pretty imprecise, and an anonymous commenter asked what exactly I meant. What's meant is this: Suppose you have a tester $T$ making $q$ queries that satisfies the given definition. Then for any constant $\delta > 0$, there is another tester $T'$ making $O(q)$ queries that satisfies the definition with $1-\delta$ and $\delta$ in place of $2/3$ and $1/3$. So if you don't care about constant factors in the number of queries, then the choice of $2/3$ and $1/3$ is arbitrary. In "testing" we don't usually care about constant factors on the number of queries, although in "local testing" we often do.

The way to get $T'$ from $T$ is to just run it $O(\log(1/\delta))$ many times independently and then accept iff at least half of the runs accepted. Then the Chernoff bound implies the claim.