Local-to-global agreement expansion via the variance method

Agreement expansion is concerned with set systems for which local assignments to the sets with almost perfect pairwise consistency (i.e., most overlapping pairs of sets agree on their intersections) implies the existence of a global assignment to the ground set (from which the sets are defined) that agrees with most of the local assignments. It is currently known that if a set system forms a two-sided or a partite high dimensional expander then agreement expansion is implied. However, it was not known whether agreement expansion can be implied for one-sided high dimensional expanders. In this work we show that agreement expansion can be deduced for one-sided high dimensional expanders assuming that all the vertices’ links (i.e., the neighborhoods of the vertices) are agreement expanders. Thus, for one-sided high dimensional expander, an agreement expansion of the large complicated complex can be deduced from agreement expansion of its small simple links. Using our result, we settle the open question whether the well studied Ramanujan complexes are agreement expanders. These complexes are neither partite nor two-sided high dimensional expanders. However, they are one-sided high dimensional expanders for which their links are partite and hence are agreement expanders. Thus, our result implies that Ramanujan complexes are agreement expanders, answering affirmatively the aforementioned open question. The local-to-global agreement expansion that we prove is based on the variance method that we develop. We show that for a high dimensional expander, if we define a function on its top faces and consider its local averages over the links then the variance of these local averages is much smaller than the global variance of the original function. This decreasing in the variance enables us to construct one global agreement function that ties together all local agreement functions.