We study the classical expander codes, introduced by Sipser and Spielman [M. Sipser and D. A. Spielman, 1996]. Given any constants 0 < α, ε < 1/2, and an arbitrary bipartite graph with N vertices on the left, M < N vertices on the right, and left degree D such that any left subset S of size at most α N has at least (1-ε)|S|D neighbors, we show that the corresponding linear code given by parity checks on the right has distance at least roughly {α N}/{2 ε}. This is strictly better than the best known previous result of 2(1-ε) α N [Madhu Sudan, 2000; Viderman, 2013] whenever ε < 1/2, and improves the previous result significantly when ε is small. Furthermore, we show that this distance is tight in general, thus providing a complete characterization of the distance of general expander codes. Next, we provide several efficient decoding algorithms, which vastly improve previous results in terms of the fraction of errors corrected, whenever ε < 1/4. Finally, we also give a bound on the list-decoding radius of general expander codes, which beats the classical Johnson bound in certain situations (e.g., when the graph is almost regular and the code has a high rate). Our techniques exploit novel combinatorial properties of bipartite expander graphs. In particular, we establish a new size-expansion tradeoff, which may be of independent interests.
@InProceedings{chen_et_al:LIPIcs.ITCS.2022.43, author = {Chen, Xue and Cheng, Kuan and Li, Xin and Ouyang, Minghui}, title = {{Improved Decoding of Expander Codes}}, booktitle = {13th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2022)}, pages = {43:1--43:3}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-95977-217-4}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2022}, volume = {215}, editor = {Braverman, Mark}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2022.43}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-156394}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2022.43}, annote = {Keywords: Expander Code, Decoding} }
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