7,770 research outputs found
NILS: a Neutrality-based Iterated Local Search and its application to Flowshop Scheduling
This paper presents a new methodology that exploits specific characteristics
from the fitness landscape. In particular, we are interested in the property of
neutrality, that deals with the fact that the same fitness value is assigned to
numerous solutions from the search space. Many combinatorial optimization
problems share this property, that is generally very inhibiting for local
search algorithms. A neutrality-based iterated local search, that allows
neutral walks to move on the plateaus, is proposed and experimented on a
permutation flowshop scheduling problem with the aim of minimizing the
makespan. Our experiments show that the proposed approach is able to find
improving solutions compared with a classical iterated local search. Moreover,
the tradeoff between the exploitation of neutrality and the exploration of new
parts of the search space is deeply analyzed
Error-Correcting Data Structures
We study data structures in the presence of adversarial noise. We want to
encode a given object in a succinct data structure that enables us to
efficiently answer specific queries about the object, even if the data
structure has been corrupted by a constant fraction of errors. This new model
is the common generalization of (static) data structures and locally decodable
error-correcting codes. The main issue is the tradeoff between the space used
by the data structure and the time (number of probes) needed to answer a query
about the encoded object. We prove a number of upper and lower bounds on
various natural error-correcting data structure problems. In particular, we
show that the optimal length of error-correcting data structures for the
Membership problem (where we want to store subsets of size s from a universe of
size n) is closely related to the optimal length of locally decodable codes for
s-bit strings.Comment: 15 pages LaTeX; an abridged version will appear in the Proceedings of
the STACS 2009 conferenc
Fast Two-Sample Testing with Analytic Representations of Probability Measures
We propose a class of nonparametric two-sample tests with a cost linear in
the sample size. Two tests are given, both based on an ensemble of distances
between analytic functions representing each of the distributions. The first
test uses smoothed empirical characteristic functions to represent the
distributions, the second uses distribution embeddings in a reproducing kernel
Hilbert space. Analyticity implies that differences in the distributions may be
detected almost surely at a finite number of randomly chosen
locations/frequencies. The new tests are consistent against a larger class of
alternatives than the previous linear-time tests based on the (non-smoothed)
empirical characteristic functions, while being much faster than the current
state-of-the-art quadratic-time kernel-based or energy distance-based tests.
Experiments on artificial benchmarks and on challenging real-world testing
problems demonstrate that our tests give a better power/time tradeoff than
competing approaches, and in some cases, better outright power than even the
most expensive quadratic-time tests. This performance advantage is retained
even in high dimensions, and in cases where the difference in distributions is
not observable with low order statistics
Space--Time Tradeoffs for Subset Sum: An Improved Worst Case Algorithm
The technique of Schroeppel and Shamir (SICOMP, 1981) has long been the most
efficient way to trade space against time for the SUBSET SUM problem. In the
random-instance setting, however, improved tradeoffs exist. In particular, the
recently discovered dissection method of Dinur et al. (CRYPTO 2012) yields a
significantly improved space--time tradeoff curve for instances with strong
randomness properties. Our main result is that these strong randomness
assumptions can be removed, obtaining the same space--time tradeoffs in the
worst case. We also show that for small space usage the dissection algorithm
can be almost fully parallelized. Our strategy for dealing with arbitrary
instances is to instead inject the randomness into the dissection process
itself by working over a carefully selected but random composite modulus, and
to introduce explicit space--time controls into the algorithm by means of a
"bailout mechanism"
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