6,992 research outputs found
Exact Computation of Influence Spread by Binary Decision Diagrams
Evaluating influence spread in social networks is a fundamental procedure to
estimate the word-of-mouth effect in viral marketing. There are enormous
studies about this topic; however, under the standard stochastic cascade
models, the exact computation of influence spread is known to be #P-hard. Thus,
the existing studies have used Monte-Carlo simulation-based approximations to
avoid exact computation.
We propose the first algorithm to compute influence spread exactly under the
independent cascade model. The algorithm first constructs binary decision
diagrams (BDDs) for all possible realizations of influence spread, then
computes influence spread by dynamic programming on the constructed BDDs. To
construct the BDDs efficiently, we designed a new frontier-based search-type
procedure. The constructed BDDs can also be used to solve other
influence-spread related problems, such as random sampling without rejection,
conditional influence spread evaluation, dynamic probability update, and
gradient computation for probability optimization problems.
We conducted computational experiments to evaluate the proposed algorithm.
The algorithm successfully computed influence spread on real-world networks
with a hundred edges in a reasonable time, which is quite impossible by the
naive algorithm. We also conducted an experiment to evaluate the accuracy of
the Monte-Carlo simulation-based approximation by comparing exact influence
spread obtained by the proposed algorithm.Comment: WWW'1
Fine-Grained Complexity Analysis of Two Classic TSP Variants
We analyze two classic variants of the Traveling Salesman Problem using the
toolkit of fine-grained complexity. Our first set of results is motivated by
the Bitonic TSP problem: given a set of points in the plane, compute a
shortest tour consisting of two monotone chains. It is a classic
dynamic-programming exercise to solve this problem in time. While the
near-quadratic dependency of similar dynamic programs for Longest Common
Subsequence and Discrete Frechet Distance has recently been proven to be
essentially optimal under the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis, we show that
bitonic tours can be found in subquadratic time. More precisely, we present an
algorithm that solves bitonic TSP in time and its bottleneck
version in time. Our second set of results concerns the popular
-OPT heuristic for TSP in the graph setting. More precisely, we study the
-OPT decision problem, which asks whether a given tour can be improved by a
-OPT move that replaces edges in the tour by new edges. A simple
algorithm solves -OPT in time for fixed . For 2-OPT, this is
easily seen to be optimal. For we prove that an algorithm with a runtime
of the form exists if and only if All-Pairs
Shortest Paths in weighted digraphs has such an algorithm. The results for
may suggest that the actual time complexity of -OPT is
. We show that this is not the case, by presenting an algorithm
that finds the best -move in time for
fixed . This implies that 4-OPT can be solved in time,
matching the best-known algorithm for 3-OPT. Finally, we show how to beat the
quadratic barrier for in two important settings, namely for points in the
plane and when we want to solve 2-OPT repeatedly.Comment: Extended abstract appears in the Proceedings of the 43rd
International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2016
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