67,971 research outputs found
The complexity of approximating conservative counting CSPs
We study the complexity of approximately solving the weighted counting
constraint satisfaction problem #CSP(F). In the conservative case, where F
contains all unary functions, there is a classification known for the case in
which the domain of functions in F is Boolean. In this paper, we give a
classification for the more general problem where functions in F have an
arbitrary finite domain. We define the notions of weak log-modularity and weak
log-supermodularity. We show that if F is weakly log-modular, then #CSP(F)is in
FP. Otherwise, it is at least as difficult to approximate as #BIS, the problem
of counting independent sets in bipartite graphs. #BIS is complete with respect
to approximation-preserving reductions for a logically-defined complexity class
#RHPi1, and is believed to be intractable. We further sub-divide the #BIS-hard
case. If F is weakly log-supermodular, then we show that #CSP(F) is as easy as
a (Boolean) log-supermodular weighted #CSP. Otherwise, we show that it is
NP-hard to approximate. Finally, we give a full trichotomy for the arity-2
case, where #CSP(F) is in FP, or is #BIS-equivalent, or is equivalent in
difficulty to #SAT, the problem of approximately counting the satisfying
assignments of a Boolean formula in conjunctive normal form. We also discuss
the algorithmic aspects of our classification.Comment: Minor revisio
A Trichotomy in the Complexity of Counting Answers to Conjunctive Queries
Conjunctive queries are basic and heavily studied database queries; in
relational algebra, they are the select-project-join queries. In this article,
we study the fundamental problem of counting, given a conjunctive query and a
relational database, the number of answers to the query on the database. In
particular, we study the complexity of this problem relative to sets of
conjunctive queries. We present a trichotomy theorem, which shows essentially
that this problem on a set of conjunctive queries is either tractable,
equivalent to the parameterized CLIQUE problem, or as hard as the parameterized
counting CLIQUE problem; the criteria describing which of these situations
occurs is simply stated, in terms of graph-theoretic conditions
The Complexity of Counting Homomorphisms to Cactus Graphs Modulo 2
A homomorphism from a graph G to a graph H is a function from V(G) to V(H)
that preserves edges. Many combinatorial structures that arise in mathematics
and computer science can be represented naturally as graph homomorphisms and as
weighted sums of graph homomorphisms. In this paper, we study the complexity of
counting homomorphisms modulo 2. The complexity of modular counting was
introduced by Papadimitriou and Zachos and it has been pioneered by Valiant who
famously introduced a problem for which counting modulo 7 is easy but counting
modulo 2 is intractable. Modular counting provides a rich setting in which to
study the structure of homomorphism problems. In this case, the structure of
the graph H has a big influence on the complexity of the problem. Thus, our
approach is graph-theoretic. We give a complete solution for the class of
cactus graphs, which are connected graphs in which every edge belongs to at
most one cycle. Cactus graphs arise in many applications such as the modelling
of wireless sensor networks and the comparison of genomes. We show that, for
some cactus graphs H, counting homomorphisms to H modulo 2 can be done in
polynomial time. For every other fixed cactus graph H, the problem is complete
for the complexity class parity-P which is a wide complexity class to which
every problem in the polynomial hierarchy can be reduced (using randomised
reductions). Determining which H lead to tractable problems can be done in
polynomial time. Our result builds upon the work of Faben and Jerrum, who gave
a dichotomy for the case in which H is a tree.Comment: minor change
DNF Sparsification and a Faster Deterministic Counting Algorithm
Given a DNF formula on n variables, the two natural size measures are the
number of terms or size s(f), and the maximum width of a term w(f). It is
folklore that short DNF formulas can be made narrow. We prove a converse,
showing that narrow formulas can be sparsified. More precisely, any width w DNF
irrespective of its size can be -approximated by a width DNF with
at most terms.
We combine our sparsification result with the work of Luby and Velikovic to
give a faster deterministic algorithm for approximately counting the number of
satisfying solutions to a DNF. Given a formula on n variables with poly(n)
terms, we give a deterministic time algorithm
that computes an additive approximation to the fraction of
satisfying assignments of f for \epsilon = 1/\poly(\log n). The previous best
result due to Luby and Velickovic from nearly two decades ago had a run-time of
.Comment: To appear in the IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity, 201
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