We study approximately differentiable functions on metric measure spaces admitting a Cheeger differentiable structure. The main result is a Whitney-type characterization of approximately differentiable functions in this setting. As an application, we prove a Stepanov-type theorem and consider approximate differentiability of Sobolev, $BV$ and maximal functions.

We prove that, in a setting of local Dirichlet forms on metric measure spaces, a two-sided sub-Gaussian estimate of the heat kernel is equivalent to the conjunction of the volume doubling propety, the elliptic Harnack inequality and a certain estimate of the capacity between concentric balls. The main technical tool is the equivalence between the capacity estimate and the estimate of a mean exit time in a ball, that uses two-sided estimates of a Green function in a ball.

We study when characteristic and H\"older continuous functions are traces of Sobolev functions on doubling metric measure spaces. We provide analytic and geometric conditions sufficient for extending characteristic and H\"older continuous functions into globally defined Sobolev functions.

We extend the extension theorems to weighted Sobolev spaces $L^p_{w,k}(\mathcal D)$ on $(\varepsilon,\delta)$ domains with doubling weight $w$ that satisfies a Poincar\'e inequality and such that $w^{-1/p}$ is locally $L^{p'}$. We also make use of the main theorem to improve weighted Sobolev interpolation inequalities.

We regard a system of left invariant vector fields $\mathcal{X}=\{X_1,\dots,X_k\}$ satisfying the H\"ormander condition and the related Carnot-Carath\'eodory metric on a unimodular Lie group $G$. We define Besov spaces corresponding to the sub-Laplacian $\Delta=\sum X_i^2$ both with positive and negative smoothness. The atomic decomposition of the spaces is given. In consequence we get the distributional characterization of the Hausdorff dimension of Borel subsets with the Haar measure zero.