Observer Placement for Source Localization: The Effect of Budgets and Transmission Variance

When an epidemic spreads in a network, a key question is where was its source, i.e., the node that started the epidemic. If we know the time at which various nodes were infected, we can attempt to use this information in order to identify the source. However, maintaining observer nodes that can provide their infection time may be costly, and we may have a budget $k$ on the number of observer nodes we can maintain. Moreover, some nodes are more informative than others due to their location in the network. Hence, a pertinent question arises: Which nodes should we select as observers in order to maximize the probability that we can accurately identify the source? Inspired by the simple setting in which the node-to-node delays in the transmission of the epidemic are deterministic, we develop a principled approach for addressing the problem even when transmission delays are random. We show that the optimal observer-placement differs depending on the variance of the transmission delays and propose approaches in both low- and high-variance settings. We validate our methods by comparing them against state-of-the-art observer-placements and show that, in both settings, our approach identifies the source with higher accuracy.Comment: Accepted for presentation at the 54th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computin

Metric-locating-dominating sets of graphs for constructing related subsets of vertices

© 2018. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/A dominating set S of a graph is a metric-locating-dominating set if each vertex of the graph is uniquely distinguished by its distances from the elements of S , and the minimum cardinality of such a set is called the metric-location-domination number. In this paper, we undertake a study that, in general graphs and specific families, relates metric-locating-dominating sets to other special sets: resolving sets, dominating sets, locating-dominating sets and doubly resolving sets. We first characterize the extremal trees of the bounds that naturally involve metric-location-domination number, metric dimension and domination number. Then, we prove that there is no polynomial upper bound on the location-domination number in terms of the metric-location-domination number, thus extending a result of Henning and Oellermann. Finally, we show different methods to transform metric-locating-dominating sets into locating-dominating sets and doubly resolving sets. Our methods produce new bounds on the minimum cardinalities of all those sets, some of them concerning parameters that have not been related so farPeer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Optimal Metric Search Is Equivalent to the Minimum Dominating Set Problem

In metric search, worst-case analysis is of little value, as the search invariably degenerates to a linear scan for ill-behaved data. Consequently, much effort has been expended on more nuanced descriptions of what performance might in fact be attainable, including heuristic baselines like the AESA family, as well as statistical proxies such as intrinsic dimensionality. This paper gets to the heart of the matter with an exact characterization of the best performance actually achievable for any given data set and query. Specifically, linear-time objective-preserving reductions are established in both directions between optimal metric search and the minimum dominating set problem, whose greedy approximation becomes the equivalent of an oracle-based AESA, repeatedly selecting the pivot that eliminates the most of the remaining points. As an illustration, the AESA heuristic is adapted to downplay the role of previously eliminated points, yielding some modest performance improvements over the original, as well as its younger relative iAESA2

Parameterized complexity of machine scheduling: 15 open problems

Machine scheduling problems are a long-time key domain of algorithms and complexity research. A novel approach to machine scheduling problems are fixed-parameter algorithms. To stimulate this thriving research direction, we propose 15 open questions in this area whose resolution we expect to lead to the discovery of new approaches and techniques both in scheduling and parameterized complexity theory.Comment: Version accepted to Computers & Operations Researc

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)

Budgeted sensor placement for source localization on trees

We address the problem of choosing a fixed number of sensor vertices in a graph in order to detect the source of a partially-observed diffusion process on the graph itself. Building on the definition of double resolvability we introduce a notion of vertex resolvability. For the case of tree graphs we give polynomial time algorithms for both finding the sensors that maximize the probability of correct detection of the source and for identifying the sensor set that minimizes the expected distance between the real source and the estimated one