Approximating Connected Facility Location with Lower and Upper Bounds via LP Rounding

We consider a lower- and upper-bounded generalization of the classical facility location problem, where each facility has a capacity (upper bound) that limits the number of clients it can serve and a lower bound on the number of clients it must serve if it is opened. We develop an LP rounding framework that exploits a Voronoi diagram-based clustering approach to derive the first bicriteria constant approximation algorithm for this problem with non-uniform lower bounds and uniform upper bounds. This naturally leads to the the first LP-based approximation algorithm for the lower bounded facility location problem (with non-uniform lower bounds). We also demonstrate the versatility of our framework by extending this and presenting the first constant approximation algorithm for some connected variant of the problems in which the facilities are required to be connected as well

On facility location problem in the local differential privacy model

In this paper we study the uncapacitated facility location problem in the model of differential privacy (DP) with uniform facility cost. Specifically, we first show that, under the hierarchically well-separated tree (HST) metrics and the super-set output setting that was introduced in [8], there is an  ∊-DP algorithm that achieves an O (¹/∊) expected multiplicative) approximation ratio; this implies an O( ^log n/_∊) approximation ratio for the general metric case, where n is the size of the input metric. These bounds improve the best-known results given by [8]. In particular, our approximation ratio for HST-metrics is independent of n, and the ratio for general metrics is independent of the aspect ratio of the input metric. On the negative side, we show that the approximation ratio of any  ∊-DP algorithm is lower bounded by Ω (1/√∊), even for instances on HST metrics with uniform facility cost, under the super-set output setting. The lower bound shows that the dependence of the approximation ratio for HST metrics on ∊ can not be removed or greatly improved. Our novel methods and techniques for both the upper and lower bound may find additional applications.CNS-2040249 - National Science Foundationhttps://proceedings.mlr.press/v151/cohen-addad22a/cohen-addad22a.pdfFirst author draf

Approximation Algorithms for Clustering and Facility Location Problems

Facility location problems arise in a wide range of applications such as plant or warehouse location problems, cache placement problems, and network design problems, and have been widely studied in Computer Science and Operations Research literature. These problems typically involve an underlying set F of facilities that provide service, and an underlying set D of clients that require service, which need to be assigned to facilities in a cost-effective fashion. This abstraction is quite versatile and also captures clustering problems, where one typically seeks to partition a set of data points into k clusters, for some given k, in a suitable way, which themselves find applications in data mining, machine learning, and bioinformatics. Basic variants of facility location problems are now relatively well-u nderstood, but we have much-less understanding of more-sophisticated models that better model the real-world concerns. In this thesis, we focus on three models inspired by some real-world optimization scenarios. In Chapter 2, we consider mobile facility location (MFL) problem, wherein we seek to relocate a given set of facilities to destinations closer to the clients as to minimize the sum of facility-movement and client-assignment costs. This abstracts facility-location settings where one has the flexibility of moving facilities from their current locations to other destinations so as to serve clients more efficiently by reducing their assignment costs. We give the first local-search based approximation algorithm for this problem and achieve the best-known approximation guarantee. Our main result is (3+epsilon)-approximation for this problem for any constant epsilon > 0 using local search which improves the previous best guarantee of 8-approximation algorithm due to [34] based on LP-rounding. Our results extend to the weighted generalization wherein each facility i has a non-negative weight w_i and the movement cost for i is w_i times the distance traveled by i. In Chapter 3, we consider a facility-location problem that we call the minimum-load k-facility location (MLkFL), which abstracts settings where the cost of serving the clients assigned to a facility is incurred by the facility. This problem was studied under the name of min-max star cover in [32,10], who (among other results) gave bicriteria approximation algorithms for MLkFL when F=D. MLkFL is rather poorly understood, and only an O(k)-approximation is currently known for MLkFL, even for line metrics. Our main result is the first polytime approximation scheme (PTAS) for MLkFL on line metrics (note that no non-trivial true approximation of any kind was known for this metric). Complementing this, we prove that MLkFL is strongly NP-hard on line metrics. In Chapter 4, we consider clustering problems with non-uniform lower bounds and outliers, and obtain the first approximation guarantees for these problems. We consider objective functions involving the radii of open facilities, where the radius of a facility i is the maximum distance between i and a client assigned to it. We consider two problems: minimizing the sum of the radii of the open facilities, which yields the lower-bounded min-sum-of-radii with outliers (LBkSRO) problem, and minimizing the maximum radius, which yields the lower-bounded k-supplier with outliers (LBkSupO) problem. We obtain an approximation factor of 12.365 for LBkSRO, which improves to 3.83 for the non-outlier version. These also constitute the first approximation bounds for the min-sum-of-radii objective when we consider lower bounds and outliers separately. We obtain approximation factors of 5 and 3 respectively for LBkSupO and its non-outlier version. These are the first approximation results for k-supplier with non-uniform lower bounds

Improved approximation algorithm for k-level UFL with penalties, a simplistic view on randomizing the scaling parameter

The state of the art in approximation algorithms for facility location problems are complicated combinations of various techniques. In particular, the currently best 1.488-approximation algorithm for the uncapacitated facility location (UFL) problem by Shi Li is presented as a result of a non-trivial randomization of a certain scaling parameter in the LP-rounding algorithm by Chudak and Shmoys combined with a primal-dual algorithm of Jain et al. In this paper we first give a simple interpretation of this randomization process in terms of solving an aux- iliary (factor revealing) LP. Then, armed with this simple view point, Abstract. we exercise the randomization on a more complicated algorithm for the k-level version of the problem with penalties in which the planner has the option to pay a penalty instead of connecting chosen clients, which results in an improved approximation algorithm

Super-Fast Distributed Algorithms for Metric Facility Location

This paper presents a distributed O(1)-approximation algorithm, with expected-$O(\log \log n)$ running time, in the $\mathcal{CONGEST}$ model for the metric facility location problem on a size-$n$ clique network. Though metric facility location has been considered by a number of researchers in low-diameter settings, this is the first sub-logarithmic-round algorithm for the problem that yields an O(1)-approximation in the setting of non-uniform facility opening costs. In order to obtain this result, our paper makes three main technical contributions. First, we show a new lower bound for metric facility location, extending the lower bound of B\u{a}doiu et al. (ICALP 2005) that applies only to the special case of uniform facility opening costs. Next, we demonstrate a reduction of the distributed metric facility location problem to the problem of computing an O(1)-ruling set of an appropriate spanning subgraph. Finally, we present a sub-logarithmic-round (in expectation) algorithm for computing a 2-ruling set in a spanning subgraph of a clique. Our algorithm accomplishes this by using a combination of randomized and deterministic sparsification.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figures. This is the full version of a paper that appeared in ICALP 201