Optimal Sparsification of Gaussian Processes
Provides a fundamental theoretical result in Gaussian process theory with implications for learning, property testing, and convex geometry.
The authors prove an optimal dimension-free sparsification theorem for suprema of centered Gaussian processes, showing that the supremum can be approximated by a subprocess with only exp(O(1/ε^2)) points, achieving error at most ε times the Gaussian width. This improves prior work by an exponential factor and is tight up to constants.
We prove an optimal dimension-free sparsification theorem for suprema of centered Gaussian processes. Given a bounded set $T\subseteq\mathbb{R}^n$, we show that the supremum of the canonical Gaussian process on $T$ can be $L^2$-approximated by the supremum of a shifted subprocess indexed by only $\exp(O(1/\varepsilon^2))$ points, with error at most $\varepsilon$ times the Gaussian width of $T$. In particular, the size of the approximating process is independent of both the ambient dimension and the cardinality of the original index set. This improves a recent sparsification theorem of De, Nadimpalli, O'Donnell, and Servedio (2026) by an exponential factor, and we show that the dependence on $\varepsilon$ is tight up to constants in the exponent. As consequences, we obtain an exponentially improved junta theorem for norms over Gaussian space and sharpen results on learning, property testing, and polyhedral approximation of convex sets under the Gaussian measure. The proof is based on an interpolation argument that combines Sudakov's minoration with the Brascamp--Lieb inequality.