A Distributed Algorithm for Spectral Sparsification of Graphs with Applications to Data Clustering

Abstract: Spectral sparsification is a technique that is used to reduce the number of non-zero entries in a positive semidefinite matrix with little changes to its spectrum. In particular, the main application of spectral sparsification is to construct sparse graphs whose spectra are close to a given dense graph. We study spectral sparsification under the assumption that the edges of a graph are allocated among sites which can communicate among each other. In this work we show that if a graph is allocated among several sites, the union of the spectral sparsifiers of each induced subgraph give us an spectral sparsifier of the original graph. In contrast to other works in the literature, we present precise computations of the approximation factor of the union of spectral sparsifiers and give an explicit calculation of the edge weights. Then we present an application of this result to data clustering in the Number-On-Forehead model of multiparty communication complexity when input data is allocated as a sunflower among sites in the party.