4,468 research outputs found
Approximating ATSP by Relaxing Connectivity
The standard LP relaxation of the asymmetric traveling salesman problem has
been conjectured to have a constant integrality gap in the metric case. We
prove this conjecture when restricted to shortest path metrics of node-weighted
digraphs. Our arguments are constructive and give a constant factor
approximation algorithm for these metrics. We remark that the considered case
is more general than the directed analog of the special case of the symmetric
traveling salesman problem for which there were recent improvements on
Christofides' algorithm.
The main idea of our approach is to first consider an easier problem obtained
by significantly relaxing the general connectivity requirements into local
connectivity conditions. For this relaxed problem, it is quite easy to give an
algorithm with a guarantee of 3 on node-weighted shortest path metrics. More
surprisingly, we then show that any algorithm (irrespective of the metric) for
the relaxed problem can be turned into an algorithm for the asymmetric
traveling salesman problem by only losing a small constant factor in the
performance guarantee. This leaves open the intriguing task of designing a
"good" algorithm for the relaxed problem on general metrics.Comment: 25 pages, 2 figures, fixed some typos in previous versio
Subgraphs in preferential attachment models
We consider subgraph counts in general preferential attachment models with
power-law degree exponent . For all subgraphs , we find the scaling
of the expected number of subgraphs as a power of the number of vertices. We
prove our results on the expected number of subgraphs by defining an
optimization problem that finds the optimal subgraph structure in terms of the
indices of the vertices that together span it and by using the representation
of the preferential attachment model as a P\'olya urn model
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