A divide-and-conquer bound for aggregate's quality and algebraic connectivity

We establish a divide-and-conquer bound for the aggregate's quality and algebraic connectivity measures, as defined for weighted undirected graphs. Aggregate's quality is defined on a set of vertices and, in the context of aggregation-based multigrid methods, it measures how well this set of vertices is represented by a single vertex. On the other hand, algebraic connectivity is defined on a graph, and measures how well this graph is connected. The considered divide-and-conquer bound for aggregate's quality relates the aggregate's quality of a union of two disjoint sets of vertices to the aggregate's quality of the two sets. Likewise, the bound for algebraic connectivity relates the algebraic connectivity of the graph induced by a union of two disjoint sets of vertices to the algebraic connectivity of the graphs induced by the two sets.