2,397 research outputs found
A rigorous analysis of the cavity equations for the minimum spanning tree
We analyze a new general representation for the Minimum Weight Steiner Tree
(MST) problem which translates the topological connectivity constraint into a
set of local conditions which can be analyzed by the so called cavity equations
techniques. For the limit case of the Spanning tree we prove that the fixed
point of the algorithm arising from the cavity equations leads to the global
optimum.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figur
A rigorous analysis of the cavity equations for the minimum spanning tree
We analyze a new general representation for the Minimum Weight Steiner Tree
(MST) problem which translates the topological connectivity constraint into a
set of local conditions which can be analyzed by the so called cavity equations
techniques. For the limit case of the Spanning tree we prove that the fixed
point of the algorithm arising from the cavity equations leads to the global
optimum.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figur
On the performance of a cavity method based algorithm for the Prize-Collecting Steiner Tree Problem on graphs
We study the behavior of an algorithm derived from the cavity method for the
Prize-Collecting Steiner Tree (PCST) problem on graphs. The algorithm is based
on the zero temperature limit of the cavity equations and as such is formally
simple (a fixed point equation resolved by iteration) and distributed
(parallelizable). We provide a detailed comparison with state-of-the-art
algorithms on a wide range of existing benchmarks networks and random graphs.
Specifically, we consider an enhanced derivative of the Goemans-Williamson
heuristics and the DHEA solver, a Branch and Cut Linear/Integer Programming
based approach. The comparison shows that the cavity algorithm outperforms the
two algorithms in most large instances both in running time and quality of the
solution. Finally we prove a few optimality properties of the solutions
provided by our algorithm, including optimality under the two post-processing
procedures defined in the Goemans-Williamson derivative and global optimality
in some limit cases
Percolation-like Scaling Exponents for Minimal Paths and Trees in the Stochastic Mean Field Model
In the mean field (or random link) model there are points and inter-point
distances are independent random variables. For and in the
limit, let (maximum number of steps
in a path whose average step-length is ). The function
is analogous to the percolation function in percolation theory:
there is a critical value at which becomes
non-zero, and (presumably) a scaling exponent in the sense
. Recently developed probabilistic
methodology (in some sense a rephrasing of the cavity method of Mezard-Parisi)
provides a simple albeit non-rigorous way of writing down such functions in
terms of solutions of fixed-point equations for probability distributions.
Solving numerically gives convincing evidence that . A parallel
study with trees instead of paths gives scaling exponent . The new
exponents coincide with those found in a different context (comparing optimal
and near-optimal solutions of mean-field TSP and MST) and reinforce the
suggestion that these scaling exponents determine universality classes for
optimization problems on random points.Comment: 19 page
The cavity approach for Steiner trees packing problems
The Belief Propagation approximation, or cavity method, has been recently
applied to several combinatorial optimization problems in its zero-temperature
implementation, the max-sum algorithm. In particular, recent developments to
solve the edge-disjoint paths problem and the prize-collecting Steiner tree
problem on graphs have shown remarkable results for several classes of graphs
and for benchmark instances. Here we propose a generalization of these
techniques for two variants of the Steiner trees packing problem where multiple
"interacting" trees have to be sought within a given graph. Depending on the
interaction among trees we distinguish the vertex-disjoint Steiner trees
problem, where trees cannot share nodes, from the edge-disjoint Steiner trees
problem, where edges cannot be shared by trees but nodes can be members of
multiple trees. Several practical problems of huge interest in network design
can be mapped into these two variants, for instance, the physical design of
Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) chips. The formalism described here relies
on two components edge-variables that allows us to formulate a massage-passing
algorithm for the V-DStP and two algorithms for the E-DStP differing in the
scaling of the computational time with respect to some relevant parameters. We
will show that one of the two formalisms used for the edge-disjoint variant
allow us to map the max-sum update equations into a weighted maximum matching
problem over proper bipartite graphs. We developed a heuristic procedure based
on the max-sum equations that shows excellent performance in synthetic networks
(in particular outperforming standard multi-step greedy procedures by large
margins) and on large benchmark instances of VLSI for which the optimal
solution is known, on which the algorithm found the optimum in two cases and
the gap to optimality was never larger than 4 %
Clustering with shallow trees
We propose a new method for hierarchical clustering based on the optimisation
of a cost function over trees of limited depth, and we derive a
message--passing method that allows to solve it efficiently. The method and
algorithm can be interpreted as a natural interpolation between two well-known
approaches, namely single linkage and the recently presented Affinity
Propagation. We analyze with this general scheme three biological/medical
structured datasets (human population based on genetic information, proteins
based on sequences and verbal autopsies) and show that the interpolation
technique provides new insight.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure
A survey of max-type recursive distributional equations
In certain problems in a variety of applied probability settings (from
probabilistic analysis of algorithms to statistical physics), the central
requirement is to solve a recursive distributional equation of the form X =^d
g((\xi_i,X_i),i\geq 1). Here (\xi_i) and g(\cdot) are given and the X_i are
independent copies of the unknown distribution X. We survey this area,
emphasizing examples where the function g(\cdot) is essentially a ``maximum''
or ``minimum'' function. We draw attention to the theoretical question of
endogeny: in the associated recursive tree process X_i, are the X_i measurable
functions of the innovations process (\xi_i)?Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/105051605000000142 in the
Annals of Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute
of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
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