We initiate the study of the role of erasures in local decoding and use our understanding to prove a separation between erasure-resilient and tolerant property testing. Local decoding in the presence of errors has been extensively studied, but has not been considered explicitly in the presence of erasures.

Motivated by ... more >>>

We design a nonadaptive algorithm that, given a Boolean function $f\colon \{0,1\}^n \to \{0,1\}$ which is $\alpha$-far from monotone, makes poly$(n, 1/\alpha)$ queries and returns an estimate that, with high probability, is an $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{n})$-approximation to the distance of $f$ to monotonicity. Furthermore, we show that for any constant $\kappa > ... more >>>