Euclidean distortion and the Sparsest Cut

Abstract

We prove that every $n$-point metric space of negative type (and, in particular, every $n$-point subset of $L_1$) embeds into a Euclidean space with distortion $O(\sqrt{\log n} \cdot\log \log n)$, a result which is tight up to the iterated logarithm factor. As a consequence, we obtain the best known polynomial-time approximation algorithm for the Sparsest Cut problem with general demands. Namely, if the demand is supported on a subset of size $k$, we achieve an approximation ratio of $O(\sqrt{\log k}\cdot \log \log k)$.