38,539 research outputs found
A linear algorithm for the cutting center of a tree
As a measure of the extent to which the removal of a node disconnects a graph, the cutting number c(v) of a node v in a connected graph G has been defined to be the number of pairs of nodes in different components of G-{v}. We present a linear algorithm for determining c(v) for all nodes of a tree, and hence for identifying the cutting center, which consists of the nodes v at which c(v) is maximized.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/25975/1/0000041.pd
Output-Sensitive Tools for Range Searching in Higher Dimensions
Let be a set of points in . A point is
\emph{-shallow} if it lies in a halfspace which contains at most points
of (including ). We show that if all points of are -shallow, then
can be partitioned into subsets, so that any hyperplane
crosses at most subsets. Given such
a partition, we can apply the standard construction of a spanning tree with
small crossing number within each subset, to obtain a spanning tree for the
point set , with crossing number . This allows us to extend the construction of Har-Peled
and Sharir \cite{hs11} to three and higher dimensions, to obtain, for any set
of points in (without the shallowness assumption), a
spanning tree with {\em small relative crossing number}. That is, any
hyperplane which contains points of on one side, crosses
edges of . Using a
similar mechanism, we also obtain a data structure for halfspace range
counting, which uses space (and somewhat higher
preprocessing cost), and answers a query in time , where is the output size
Minimum Weight Perfect Matching via Blossom Belief Propagation
Max-product Belief Propagation (BP) is a popular message-passing algorithm
for computing a Maximum-A-Posteriori (MAP) assignment over a distribution
represented by a Graphical Model (GM). It has been shown that BP can solve a
number of combinatorial optimization problems including minimum weight
matching, shortest path, network flow and vertex cover under the following
common assumption: the respective Linear Programming (LP) relaxation is tight,
i.e., no integrality gap is present. However, when LP shows an integrality gap,
no model has been known which can be solved systematically via sequential
applications of BP. In this paper, we develop the first such algorithm, coined
Blossom-BP, for solving the minimum weight matching problem over arbitrary
graphs. Each step of the sequential algorithm requires applying BP over a
modified graph constructed by contractions and expansions of blossoms, i.e.,
odd sets of vertices. Our scheme guarantees termination in O(n^2) of BP runs,
where n is the number of vertices in the original graph. In essence, the
Blossom-BP offers a distributed version of the celebrated Edmonds' Blossom
algorithm by jumping at once over many sub-steps with a single BP. Moreover,
our result provides an interpretation of the Edmonds' algorithm as a sequence
of LPs
Low-Degree Spanning Trees of Small Weight
The degree-d spanning tree problem asks for a minimum-weight spanning tree in
which the degree of each vertex is at most d. When d=2 the problem is TSP, and
in this case, the well-known Christofides algorithm provides a
1.5-approximation algorithm (assuming the edge weights satisfy the triangle
inequality).
In 1984, Christos Papadimitriou and Umesh Vazirani posed the challenge of
finding an algorithm with performance guarantee less than 2 for Euclidean
graphs (points in R^n) and d > 2. This paper gives the first answer to that
challenge, presenting an algorithm to compute a degree-3 spanning tree of cost
at most 5/3 times the MST. For points in the plane, the ratio improves to 3/2
and the algorithm can also find a degree-4 spanning tree of cost at most 5/4
times the MST.Comment: conference version in Symposium on Theory of Computing (1994
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