1,514 research outputs found
Incremental Medians via Online Bidding
In the k-median problem we are given sets of facilities and customers, and
distances between them. For a given set F of facilities, the cost of serving a
customer u is the minimum distance between u and a facility in F. The goal is
to find a set F of k facilities that minimizes the sum, over all customers, of
their service costs.
Following Mettu and Plaxton, we study the incremental medians problem, where
k is not known in advance, and the algorithm produces a nested sequence of
facility sets where the kth set has size k. The algorithm is c-cost-competitive
if the cost of each set is at most c times the cost of the optimum set of size
k. We give improved incremental algorithms for the metric version: an
8-cost-competitive deterministic algorithm, a 2e ~ 5.44-cost-competitive
randomized algorithm, a (24+epsilon)-cost-competitive, poly-time deterministic
algorithm, and a (6e+epsilon ~ .31)-cost-competitive, poly-time randomized
algorithm.
The algorithm is s-size-competitive if the cost of the kth set is at most the
minimum cost of any set of size k, and has size at most s k. The optimal
size-competitive ratios for this problem are 4 (deterministic) and e
(randomized). We present the first poly-time O(log m)-size-approximation
algorithm for the offline problem and first poly-time O(log m)-size-competitive
algorithm for the incremental problem.
Our proofs reduce incremental medians to the following online bidding
problem: faced with an unknown threshold T, an algorithm submits "bids" until
it submits a bid that is at least the threshold. It pays the sum of all its
bids. We prove that folklore algorithms for online bidding are optimally
competitive.Comment: conference version appeared in LATIN 2006 as "Oblivious Medians via
Online Bidding
The Traveling Salesman Problem: Low-Dimensionality Implies a Polynomial Time Approximation Scheme
The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is among the most famous NP-hard
optimization problems. We design for this problem a randomized polynomial-time
algorithm that computes a (1+eps)-approximation to the optimal tour, for any
fixed eps>0, in TSP instances that form an arbitrary metric space with bounded
intrinsic dimension.
The celebrated results of Arora (A-98) and Mitchell (M-99) prove that the
above result holds in the special case of TSP in a fixed-dimensional Euclidean
space. Thus, our algorithm demonstrates that the algorithmic tractability of
metric TSP depends on the dimensionality of the space and not on its specific
geometry. This result resolves a problem that has been open since the
quasi-polynomial time algorithm of Talwar (T-04)
Improved Approximation Algorithms for Cycle and Path Packings
Given an edge-weighted (metric/general) complete graph with vertices, the
maximum weight (metric/general) -cycle/path packing problem is to find a set
of vertex-disjoint -cycles/paths such that the total weight is
maximized. In this paper, we consider approximation algorithms. For metric
-cycle packing, we improve the previous approximation ratio from to
for , and from for to
for constant odd and to for even . For metric -path packing, we
improve the approximation ratio from to
for even . For the case of
, we improve the approximation ratio from to for metric
4-cycle packing, from to for general 4-cycle packing, and from
to for metric 4-path packing.Comment: To appear in WALCOM 202
Fast Construction of Nets in Low Dimensional Metrics, and Their Applications
We present a near linear time algorithm for constructing hierarchical nets in
finite metric spaces with constant doubling dimension. This data-structure is
then applied to obtain improved algorithms for the following problems:
Approximate nearest neighbor search, well-separated pair decomposition, compact
representation scheme, doubling measure, and computation of the (approximate)
Lipschitz constant of a function. In all cases, the running (preprocessing)
time is near-linear and the space being used is linear.Comment: 41 pages. Extensive clean-up of minor English error
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