529 research outputs found
Metro-Line Crossing Minimization: Hardness, Approximations, and Tractable Cases
Crossing minimization is one of the central problems in graph drawing.
Recently, there has been an increased interest in the problem of minimizing
crossings between paths in drawings of graphs. This is the metro-line crossing
minimization problem (MLCM): Given an embedded graph and a set L of simple
paths, called lines, order the lines on each edge so that the total number of
crossings is minimized. So far, the complexity of MLCM has been an open
problem. In contrast, the problem variant in which line ends must be placed in
outermost position on their edges (MLCM-P) is known to be NP-hard. Our main
results answer two open questions: (i) We show that MLCM is NP-hard. (ii) We
give an -approximation algorithm for MLCM-P
On the Complexity of the Single Individual SNP Haplotyping Problem
We present several new results pertaining to haplotyping. These results
concern the combinatorial problem of reconstructing haplotypes from incomplete
and/or imperfectly sequenced haplotype fragments. We consider the complexity of
the problems Minimum Error Correction (MEC) and Longest Haplotype
Reconstruction (LHR) for different restrictions on the input data.
Specifically, we look at the gapless case, where every row of the input
corresponds to a gapless haplotype-fragment, and the 1-gap case, where at most
one gap per fragment is allowed. We prove that MEC is APX-hard in the 1-gap
case and still NP-hard in the gapless case. In addition, we question earlier
claims that MEC is NP-hard even when the input matrix is restricted to being
completely binary. Concerning LHR, we show that this problem is NP-hard and
APX-hard in the 1-gap case (and thus also in the general case), but is
polynomial time solvable in the gapless case.Comment: 26 pages. Related to the WABI2005 paper, "On the Complexity of
Several Haplotyping Problems", but with more/different results. This papers
has just been submitted to the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology
and Bioinformatics and we are awaiting a decision on acceptance. It differs
from the mid-August version of this paper because here we prove that 1-gap
LHR is APX-hard. (In the earlier version of the paper we could prove only
that it was NP-hard.
Inapproximability of Maximum Biclique Problems, Minimum -Cut and Densest At-Least--Subgraph from the Small Set Expansion Hypothesis
The Small Set Expansion Hypothesis (SSEH) is a conjecture which roughly
states that it is NP-hard to distinguish between a graph with a small subset of
vertices whose edge expansion is almost zero and one in which all small subsets
of vertices have expansion almost one. In this work, we prove inapproximability
results for the following graph problems based on this hypothesis:
- Maximum Edge Biclique (MEB): given a bipartite graph , find a complete
bipartite subgraph of with maximum number of edges.
- Maximum Balanced Biclique (MBB): given a bipartite graph , find a
balanced complete bipartite subgraph of with maximum number of vertices.
- Minimum -Cut: given a weighted graph , find a set of edges with
minimum total weight whose removal partitions into connected
components.
- Densest At-Least--Subgraph (DALS): given a weighted graph , find a
set of at least vertices such that the induced subgraph on has
maximum density (the ratio between the total weight of edges and the number of
vertices).
We show that, assuming SSEH and NP BPP, no polynomial time
algorithm gives -approximation for MEB or MBB for every
constant . Moreover, assuming SSEH, we show that it is NP-hard
to approximate Minimum -Cut and DALS to within factor
of the optimum for every constant .
The ratios in our results are essentially tight since trivial algorithms give
-approximation to both MEB and MBB and efficient -approximation
algorithms are known for Minimum -Cut [SV95] and DALS [And07, KS09].
Our first result is proved by combining a technique developed by Raghavendra
et al. [RST12] to avoid locality of gadget reductions with a generalization of
Bansal and Khot's long code test [BK09] whereas our second result is shown via
elementary reductions.Comment: A preliminary version of this work will appear at ICALP 2017 under a
different title "Inapproximability of Maximum Edge Biclique, Maximum Balanced
Biclique and Minimum k-Cut from the Small Set Expansion Hypothesis
Approximate Graph Coloring by Semidefinite Programming
We consider the problem of coloring k-colorable graphs with the fewest
possible colors. We present a randomized polynomial time algorithm that colors
a 3-colorable graph on vertices with min O(Delta^{1/3} log^{1/2} Delta log
n), O(n^{1/4} log^{1/2} n) colors where Delta is the maximum degree of any
vertex. Besides giving the best known approximation ratio in terms of n, this
marks the first non-trivial approximation result as a function of the maximum
degree Delta. This result can be generalized to k-colorable graphs to obtain a
coloring using min O(Delta^{1-2/k} log^{1/2} Delta log n), O(n^{1-3/(k+1)}
log^{1/2} n) colors. Our results are inspired by the recent work of Goemans and
Williamson who used an algorithm for semidefinite optimization problems, which
generalize linear programs, to obtain improved approximations for the MAX CUT
and MAX 2-SAT problems. An intriguing outcome of our work is a duality
relationship established between the value of the optimum solution to our
semidefinite program and the Lovasz theta-function. We show lower bounds on the
gap between the optimum solution of our semidefinite program and the actual
chromatic number; by duality this also demonstrates interesting new facts about
the theta-function
Robustly Solvable Constraint Satisfaction Problems
An algorithm for a constraint satisfaction problem is called robust if it
outputs an assignment satisfying at least -fraction of the
constraints given a -satisfiable instance, where
as . Guruswami and
Zhou conjectured a characterization of constraint languages for which the
corresponding constraint satisfaction problem admits an efficient robust
algorithm. This paper confirms their conjecture
Bisect and Conquer: Hierarchical Clustering via Max-Uncut Bisection
Hierarchical Clustering is an unsupervised data analysis method which has
been widely used for decades. Despite its popularity, it had an underdeveloped
analytical foundation and to address this, Dasgupta recently introduced an
optimization viewpoint of hierarchical clustering with pairwise similarity
information that spurred a line of work shedding light on old algorithms (e.g.,
Average-Linkage), but also designing new algorithms. Here, for the maximization
dual of Dasgupta's objective (introduced by Moseley-Wang), we present
polynomial-time .4246 approximation algorithms that use Max-Uncut Bisection as
a subroutine. The previous best worst-case approximation factor in polynomial
time was .336, improving only slightly over Average-Linkage which achieves 1/3.
Finally, we complement our positive results by providing APX-hardness (even for
0-1 similarities), under the Small Set Expansion hypothesis
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