A Sharp Tail Bound for the Expander Random Sampler

Abstract

Consider an expander graph in which a $\mu$ fraction of the vertices are marked. A random walk starts at a uniform vertex and at each step continues to a random neighbor. Gillman showed in 1993 that the number of marked vertices seen in a random walk of length $n$ is concentrated around its expectation, $\Phi := \mu n$, independent of the size of the graph. Here we provide a new and sharp tail bound, improving on the existing bounds whenever $\mu$ is not too large.