29,451 research outputs found
The Minimum Expectation Selection Problem
We define the min-min expectation selection problem (resp. max-min
expectation selection problem) to be that of selecting k out of n given
discrete probability distributions, to minimize (resp. maximize) the
expectation of the minimum value resulting when independent random variables
are drawn from the selected distributions. We assume each distribution has
finitely many atoms. Let d be the number of distinct values in the support of
the distributions. We show that if d is a constant greater than 2, the min-min
expectation problem is NP-complete but admits a fully polynomial time
approximation scheme. For d an arbitrary integer, it is NP-hard to approximate
the min-min expectation problem with any constant approximation factor. The
max-min expectation problem is polynomially solvable for constant d; we leave
open its complexity for variable d. We also show similar results for binary
selection problems in which we must choose one distribution from each of n
pairs of distributions.Comment: 13 pages, 1 figure. Full version of paper presented at 10th Int.
Conf. Random Structures and Algorithms, Poznan, Poland, August 200
Approximate Clustering via Metric Partitioning
In this paper we consider two metric covering/clustering problems -
\textit{Minimum Cost Covering Problem} (MCC) and -clustering. In the MCC
problem, we are given two point sets (clients) and (servers), and a
metric on . We would like to cover the clients by balls centered at
the servers. The objective function to minimize is the sum of the -th
power of the radii of the balls. Here is a parameter of the
problem (but not of a problem instance). MCC is closely related to the
-clustering problem. The main difference between -clustering and MCC is
that in -clustering one needs to select balls to cover the clients.
For any \eps > 0, we describe quasi-polynomial time (1 + \eps)
approximation algorithms for both of the problems. However, in case of
-clustering the algorithm uses (1 + \eps)k balls. Prior to our work, a
and a approximation were achieved by
polynomial-time algorithms for MCC and -clustering, respectively, where is an absolute constant. These two problems are thus interesting examples of
metric covering/clustering problems that admit (1 + \eps)-approximation
(using (1+\eps)k balls in case of -clustering), if one is willing to
settle for quasi-polynomial time. In contrast, for the variant of MCC where
is part of the input, we show under standard assumptions that no
polynomial time algorithm can achieve an approximation factor better than
for .Comment: 19 page
Hybrid Rounding Techniques for Knapsack Problems
We address the classical knapsack problem and a variant in which an upper
bound is imposed on the number of items that can be selected. We show that
appropriate combinations of rounding techniques yield novel and powerful ways
of rounding. As an application of these techniques, we present a linear-storage
Polynomial Time Approximation Scheme (PTAS) and a Fully Polynomial Time
Approximation Scheme (FPTAS) that compute an approximate solution, of any fixed
accuracy, in linear time. This linear complexity bound gives a substantial
improvement of the best previously known polynomial bounds.Comment: 19 LaTeX page
The Geometry of Scheduling
We consider the following general scheduling problem: The input consists of n
jobs, each with an arbitrary release time, size, and a monotone function
specifying the cost incurred when the job is completed at a particular time.
The objective is to find a preemptive schedule of minimum aggregate cost. This
problem formulation is general enough to include many natural scheduling
objectives, such as weighted flow, weighted tardiness, and sum of flow squared.
Our main result is a randomized polynomial-time algorithm with an approximation
ratio O(log log nP), where P is the maximum job size. We also give an O(1)
approximation in the special case when all jobs have identical release times.
The main idea is to reduce this scheduling problem to a particular geometric
set-cover problem which is then solved using the local ratio technique and
Varadarajan's quasi-uniform sampling technique. This general algorithmic
approach improves the best known approximation ratios by at least an
exponential factor (and much more in some cases) for essentially all of the
nontrivial common special cases of this problem. Our geometric interpretation
of scheduling may be of independent interest.Comment: Conference version in FOCS 201
Malleable Scheduling Beyond Identical Machines
In malleable job scheduling, jobs can be executed simultaneously on multiple machines with the processing time depending on the number of allocated machines. Jobs are required to be executed non-preemptively and in unison, in the sense that they occupy, during their execution, the same time interval over all the machines of the allocated set. In this work, we study generalizations of malleable job scheduling inspired by standard scheduling on unrelated machines. Specifically, we introduce a general model of malleable job scheduling, where each machine has a (possibly different) speed for each job, and the processing time of a job j on a set of allocated machines S depends on the total speed of S for j. For machines with unrelated speeds, we show that the optimal makespan cannot be approximated within a factor less than e/(e-1), unless P = NP. On the positive side, we present polynomial-time algorithms with approximation ratios 2e/(e-1) for machines with unrelated speeds, 3 for machines with uniform speeds, and 7/3 for restricted assignments on identical machines. Our algorithms are based on deterministic LP rounding and result in sparse schedules, in the sense that each machine shares at most one job with other machines. We also prove lower bounds on the integrality gap of 1+phi for unrelated speeds (phi is the golden ratio) and 2 for uniform speeds and restricted assignments. To indicate the generality of our approach, we show that it also yields constant factor approximation algorithms (i) for minimizing the sum of weighted completion times; and (ii) a variant where we determine the effective speed of a set of allocated machines based on the L_p norm of their speeds
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