8,806 research outputs found
Incidence Geometries and the Pass Complexity of Semi-Streaming Set Cover
Set cover, over a universe of size , may be modelled as a data-streaming
problem, where the sets that comprise the instance are to be read one by
one. A semi-streaming algorithm is allowed only space to process this stream. For each , we give a very
simple deterministic algorithm that makes passes over the input stream and
returns an appropriately certified -approximation to the
optimum set cover. More importantly, we proceed to show that this approximation
factor is essentially tight, by showing that a factor better than
is unachievable for a -pass semi-streaming
algorithm, even allowing randomisation. In particular, this implies that
achieving a -approximation requires
passes, which is tight up to the factor. These results extend to a
relaxation of the set cover problem where we are allowed to leave an
fraction of the universe uncovered: the tight bounds on the best
approximation factor achievable in passes turn out to be
. Our lower bounds are based
on a construction of a family of high-rank incidence geometries, which may be
thought of as vast generalisations of affine planes. This construction, based
on algebraic techniques, appears flexible enough to find other applications and
is therefore interesting in its own right.Comment: 20 page
Inapproximability of Combinatorial Optimization Problems
We survey results on the hardness of approximating combinatorial optimization
problems
On rooted -connectivity problems in quasi-bipartite digraphs
We consider the directed Rooted Subset -Edge-Connectivity problem: given a
set of terminals in a digraph with edge costs and
an integer , find a min-cost subgraph of that contains edge disjoint
-paths for all . The case when every edge of positive cost has
head in admits a polynomial time algorithm due to Frank, and the case when
all positive cost edges are incident to is equivalent to the -Multicover
problem. Recently, [Chan et al. APPROX20] obtained ratio for
quasi-bipartite instances, when every edge in has an end in . We give
a simple proof for the same ratio for a more general problem of covering an
arbitrary -intersecting supermodular set function by a minimum cost edge
set, and for the case when only every positive cost edge has an end in
Computing an Approximately Optimal Agreeable Set of Items
We study the problem of finding a small subset of items that is
\emph{agreeable} to all agents, meaning that all agents value the subset at
least as much as its complement. Previous work has shown worst-case bounds,
over all instances with a given number of agents and items, on the number of
items that may need to be included in such a subset. Our goal in this paper is
to efficiently compute an agreeable subset whose size approximates the size of
the smallest agreeable subset for a given instance. We consider three
well-known models for representing the preferences of the agents: ordinal
preferences on single items, the value oracle model, and additive utilities. In
each of these models, we establish virtually tight bounds on the approximation
ratio that can be obtained by algorithms running in polynomial time.Comment: A preliminary version appeared in Proceedings of the 26th
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 201
The covert set-cover problem with application to Network Discovery
We address a version of the set-cover problem where we do not know the sets
initially (and hence referred to as covert) but we can query an element to find
out which sets contain this element as well as query a set to know the
elements. We want to find a small set-cover using a minimal number of such
queries. We present a Monte Carlo randomized algorithm that approximates an
optimal set-cover of size within factor with high probability
using queries where is the input size.
We apply this technique to the network discovery problem that involves
certifying all the edges and non-edges of an unknown -vertices graph based
on layered-graph queries from a minimal number of vertices. By reducing it to
the covert set-cover problem we present an -competitive Monte
Carlo randomized algorithm for the covert version of network discovery problem.
The previously best known algorithm has a competitive ratio of and therefore our result achieves an exponential improvement
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