Improved Distributed Expander Decomposition and Nearly Optimal Triangle Enumeration

An $(\epsilon,\phi)$-expander decomposition of a graph $G=(V,E)$ is a clustering of the vertices $V=V_{1}\cup\cdots\cup V_{x}$ such that (1) each cluster $V_{i}$ induces subgraph with conductance at least $\phi$, and (2) the number of inter-cluster edges is at most $\epsilon|E|$. In this paper, we give an improved distributed expander decomposition in the CONGEST model. Specifically, we construct an $(\epsilon,\phi)$-expander decomposition with $\phi=(\epsilon/\log n)^{2^{O(k)}}$ in $O(n^{2/k}\cdot\text{poly}(1/\phi,\log n))$ rounds for any $\epsilon\in(0,1)$ and positive integer $k$. For example, a $(0.01,1/\text{poly}\log n)$-expander decomposition can be computed in $O(n^{\gamma})$ rounds, for any constant $\gamma>0$. Previously, the algorithm by Chang, Pettie, and Zhang can construct a $(1/6,1/\text{poly}\log n)$-expander decomposition using $\tilde{O}(n^{1-\delta})$ rounds for any $\delta>0$, with a caveat that the algorithm is allowed to throw away a set of edges which forms a subgraph with arboricity at most $n^{\delta}$. Our algorithm does not have this caveat. By modifying the distributed algorithm for routing on expanders by Ghaffari, Kuhn and Su [PODC'17], we obtain a triangle enumeration algorithm using $\tilde{O}(n^{1/3})$ rounds. This matches the lower bound by Izumi and Le Gall [PODC'17] and Pandurangan, Robinson and Scquizzato [SPAA'18] of $\tilde{\Omega}(n^{1/3})$ which holds even in the CONGESTED-CLIQUE model. To the best of our knowledge, this provides the first non-trivial example for a problem that has essentially the same complexity (up to a polylogarithmic factor) in both CONGEST and CONGESTED-CLIQUE. The key technique in our proof is the first distributed approximation algorithm for finding a low conductance cut that is as balanced as possible. Previous distributed sparse cut algorithms do not have this nearly most balanced guarantee.