Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2016 iii Paper 210 4 c Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-06
For partitions, the appropriate Hamming distance between unlabelled bipartitions is . It counts vertices assigned to the wrong group after the better global exchange of the two group names. The printed signed-indicator formula does not implement this exchange: negating a zero-one indicator is not taking its complement. It must be read as this partition distance, or written with the membership vectors.
Use the corrected leading eigenvector estimator from 4(b), and orient its sign to minimize . At every wrongly signed coordinate, this difference has magnitude at least . Therefore the sign rounding bound for a unit eigenvector givesThe last inequality uses the projector distance bound . Taking the expected value of this Frobenius norm estimate proves . The assertion relies on the corrected estimator and partition-distance definition.