5,233 research outputs found
New Approximability Results for the Robust k-Median Problem
We consider a robust variant of the classical -median problem, introduced
by Anthony et al. \cite{AnthonyGGN10}. In the \emph{Robust -Median problem},
we are given an -vertex metric space and client sets . The objective is to open a set of
facilities such that the worst case connection cost over all client sets is
minimized; in other words, minimize . Anthony
et al.\ showed an approximation algorithm for any metric and
APX-hardness even in the case of uniform metric. In this paper, we show that
their algorithm is nearly tight by providing
approximation hardness, unless . This hardness result holds even for uniform and line
metrics. To our knowledge, this is one of the rare cases in which a problem on
a line metric is hard to approximate to within logarithmic factor. We
complement the hardness result by an experimental evaluation of different
heuristics that shows that very simple heuristics achieve good approximations
for realistic classes of instances.Comment: 19 page
The Unreasonable Success of Local Search: Geometric Optimization
What is the effectiveness of local search algorithms for geometric problems
in the plane? We prove that local search with neighborhoods of magnitude
is an approximation scheme for the following problems in the
Euclidian plane: TSP with random inputs, Steiner tree with random inputs,
facility location (with worst case inputs), and bicriteria -median (also
with worst case inputs). The randomness assumption is necessary for TSP
Faster Clustering via Preprocessing
We examine the efficiency of clustering a set of points, when the
encompassing metric space may be preprocessed in advance. In computational
problems of this genre, there is a first stage of preprocessing, whose input is
a collection of points ; the next stage receives as input a query set
, and should report a clustering of according to some
objective, such as 1-median, in which case the answer is a point
minimizing .
We design fast algorithms that approximately solve such problems under
standard clustering objectives like -center and -median, when the metric
has low doubling dimension. By leveraging the preprocessing stage, our
algorithms achieve query time that is near-linear in the query size ,
and is (almost) independent of the total number of points .Comment: 24 page
Coresets-Methods and History: A Theoreticians Design Pattern for Approximation and Streaming Algorithms
We present a technical survey on the state of the art approaches in data reduction and the coreset framework. These include geometric decompositions, gradient methods, random sampling, sketching and random projections. We further outline their importance for the design of streaming algorithms and give a brief overview on lower bounding techniques
Fault Tolerant Clustering Revisited
In discrete k-center and k-median clustering, we are given a set of points P
in a metric space M, and the task is to output a set C \subseteq ? P, |C| = k,
such that the cost of clustering P using C is as small as possible. For
k-center, the cost is the furthest a point has to travel to its nearest center,
whereas for k-median, the cost is the sum of all point to nearest center
distances. In the fault-tolerant versions of these problems, we are given an
additional parameter 1 ?\leq \ell \leq ? k, such that when computing the cost
of clustering, points are assigned to their \ell-th nearest-neighbor in C,
instead of their nearest neighbor. We provide constant factor approximation
algorithms for these problems that are both conceptually simple and highly
practical from an implementation stand-point
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