1 research outputs found
Bringing Order to Special Cases of Klee's Measure Problem
Klee's Measure Problem (KMP) asks for the volume of the union of n
axis-aligned boxes in d-space. Omitting logarithmic factors, the best algorithm
has runtime O*(n^{d/2}) [Overmars,Yap'91]. There are faster algorithms known
for several special cases: Cube-KMP (where all boxes are cubes), Unitcube-KMP
(where all boxes are cubes of equal side length), Hypervolume (where all boxes
share a vertex), and k-Grounded (where the projection onto the first k
dimensions is a Hypervolume instance).
In this paper we bring some order to these special cases by providing
reductions among them. In addition to the trivial inclusions, we establish
Hypervolume as the easiest of these special cases, and show that the runtimes
of Unitcube-KMP and Cube-KMP are polynomially related. More importantly, we
show that any algorithm for one of the special cases with runtime T(n,d)
implies an algorithm for the general case with runtime T(n,2d), yielding the
first non-trivial relation between KMP and its special cases. This allows to
transfer W[1]-hardness of KMP to all special cases, proving that no n^{o(d)}
algorithm exists for any of the special cases under reasonable complexity
theoretic assumptions. Furthermore, assuming that there is no improved
algorithm for the general case of KMP (no algorithm with runtime O(n^{d/2 -
eps})) this reduction shows that there is no algorithm with runtime
O(n^{floor(d/2)/2 - eps}) for any of the special cases. Under the same
assumption we show a tight lower bound for a recent algorithm for 2-Grounded
[Yildiz,Suri'12].Comment: 17 page