33 research outputs found
Centrality of Trees for Capacitated k-Center
There is a large discrepancy in our understanding of uncapacitated and
capacitated versions of network location problems. This is perhaps best
illustrated by the classical k-center problem: there is a simple tight
2-approximation algorithm for the uncapacitated version whereas the first
constant factor approximation algorithm for the general version with capacities
was only recently obtained by using an intricate rounding algorithm that
achieves an approximation guarantee in the hundreds.
Our paper aims to bridge this discrepancy. For the capacitated k-center
problem, we give a simple algorithm with a clean analysis that allows us to
prove an approximation guarantee of 9. It uses the standard LP relaxation and
comes close to settling the integrality gap (after necessary preprocessing),
which is narrowed down to either 7, 8 or 9. The algorithm proceeds by first
reducing to special tree instances, and then solves such instances optimally.
Our concept of tree instances is quite versatile, and applies to natural
variants of the capacitated k-center problem for which we also obtain improved
algorithms. Finally, we give evidence to show that more powerful preprocessing
could lead to better algorithms, by giving an approximation algorithm that
beats the integrality gap for instances where all non-zero capacities are
uniform.Comment: 21 pages, 2 figure
Constant Factor Approximation for Capacitated k-Center with Outliers
The -center problem is a classic facility location problem, where given an
edge-weighted graph one is to find a subset of vertices ,
such that each vertex in is "close" to some vertex in . The
approximation status of this basic problem is well understood, as a simple
2-approximation algorithm is known to be tight. Consequently different
extensions were studied.
In the capacitated version of the problem each vertex is assigned a capacity,
which is a strict upper bound on the number of clients a facility can serve,
when located at this vertex. A constant factor approximation for the
capacitated -center was obtained last year by Cygan, Hajiaghayi and Khuller
[FOCS'12], which was recently improved to a 9-approximation by An, Bhaskara and
Svensson [arXiv'13].
In a different generalization of the problem some clients (denoted as
outliers) may be disregarded. Here we are additionally given an integer and
the goal is to serve exactly clients, which the algorithm is free to
choose. In 2001 Charikar et al. [SODA'01] presented a 3-approximation for the
-center problem with outliers.
In this paper we consider a common generalization of the two extensions
previously studied separately, i.e. we work with the capacitated -center
with outliers. We present the first constant factor approximation algorithm
with approximation ratio of 25 even for the case of non-uniform hard
capacities.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures, accepted to STACS 201
Capacitated Center Problems with Two-Sided Bounds and Outliers
In recent years, the capacitated center problems have attracted a lot of
research interest. Given a set of vertices , we want to find a subset of
vertices , called centers, such that the maximum cluster radius is
minimized. Moreover, each center in should satisfy some capacity
constraint, which could be an upper or lower bound on the number of vertices it
can serve. Capacitated -center problems with one-sided bounds (upper or
lower) have been well studied in previous work, and a constant factor
approximation was obtained.
We are the first to study the capacitated center problem with both capacity
lower and upper bounds (with or without outliers). We assume each vertex has a
uniform lower bound and a non-uniform upper bound. For the case of opening
exactly centers, we note that a generalization of a recent LP approach can
achieve constant factor approximation algorithms for our problems. Our main
contribution is a simple combinatorial algorithm for the case where there is no
cardinality constraint on the number of open centers. Our combinatorial
algorithm is simpler and achieves better constant approximation factor compared
to the LP approach
Capacitated k-Center Problem with Vertex Weights
We study the capacitated k-center problem with vertex weights. It is a generalization of the well known k-center problem. In this variant each vertex has a weight and a capacity. The assignment cost of a vertex to a center is given by the product of the weight of the vertex and its distance to
the center. The distances are assumed to form a metric. Each center can only serve as many vertices as its capacity. We show an n^{1-epsilon}-approximation hardness for this problem, for any epsilon > 0, where n is the number of vertices in the input. Both the capacitated and the weighted versions of the k-center problem individually can be approximated within a constant factor. Yet the common extension of both the generalizations cannot be approximated efficiently within a constant factor, unless P = NP. This problem, to the best of our knowledge, is the first facility location problem with metric distances known to have a super-constant inapproximability result. The hardness result easily generalizes to versions of the problem that consider the p-norm of the assignment costs (weighted distances) as the objective function. We give n^{1- 1/p - epsilon}-approximation hardness for this problem, for p>1.
We complement the hardness result by showing a simple n-approximation algorithm for this problem. We also give a bi-criteria constant factor approximation algorithm, for the case of uniform capacities, which opens at most 2k centers
Privacy Preserving Clustering with Constraints
The k-center problem is a classical combinatorial optimization problem which asks to find k centers such that the maximum distance of any input point in a set P to its assigned center is minimized. The problem allows for elegant 2-approximations. However, the situation becomes significantly more difficult when constraints are added to the problem. We raise the question whether general methods can be derived to turn an approximation algorithm for a clustering problem with some constraints into an approximation algorithm that respects one constraint more. Our constraint of choice is privacy: Here, we are asked to only open a center when at least l clients will be assigned to it. We show how to combine privacy with several other constraints
Sherali-Adams gaps, flow-cover inequalities and generalized configurations for capacity-constrained Facility Location
Metric facility location is a well-studied problem for which linear
programming methods have been used with great success in deriving approximation
algorithms. The capacity-constrained generalizations, such as capacitated
facility location (CFL) and lower-bounded facility location (LBFL), have proved
notorious as far as LP-based approximation is concerned: while there are
local-search-based constant-factor approximations, there is no known linear
relaxation with constant integrality gap. According to Williamson and Shmoys
devising a relaxation-based approximation for \cfl\ is among the top 10 open
problems in approximation algorithms.
This paper advances significantly the state-of-the-art on the effectiveness
of linear programming for capacity-constrained facility location through a host
of impossibility results for both CFL and LBFL. We show that the relaxations
obtained from the natural LP at levels of the Sherali-Adams
hierarchy have an unbounded gap, partially answering an open question of
\cite{LiS13, AnBS13}. Here, denotes the number of facilities in the
instance. Building on the ideas for this result, we prove that the standard CFL
relaxation enriched with the generalized flow-cover valid inequalities
\cite{AardalPW95} has also an unbounded gap. This disproves a long-standing
conjecture of \cite{LeviSS12}. We finally introduce the family of proper
relaxations which generalizes to its logical extreme the classic star
relaxation and captures general configuration-style LPs. We characterize the
behavior of proper relaxations for CFL and LBFL through a sharp threshold
phenomenon.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1305.599
Capacitated Covering Problems in Geometric Spaces
In this article, we consider the following capacitated covering problem. We are given a set P of n points and a set B of balls from some metric space, and a positive integer U that represents the capacity of each of the balls in B. We would like to compute a subset B\u27 subseteq B of balls and assign each point in P to some ball in B\u27 that contains it, such that the number of points assigned to any ball is at most U. The objective function that we would like to minimize is the cardinality of B\u27.
We consider this problem in arbitrary metric spaces as well as Euclidean spaces of constant dimension. In the metric setting, even the uncapacitated version of the problem is hard to approximate to within a logarithmic factor. In the Euclidean setting, the best known approximation guarantee in dimensions 3 and higher is logarithmic in the number of points. Thus we focus on obtaining "bi-criteria" approximations. In particular, we are allowed to expand the balls in our solution by some factor, but optimal solutions do not have that flexibility. Our main result is that allowing constant factor expansion of the input balls suffices to obtain constant approximations for this problem. In fact, in the Euclidean setting, only (1+epsilon) factor expansion is sufficient for any epsilon > 0, with the approximation factor being a polynomial in 1/epsilon. We obtain these results using a unified scheme for rounding the natural LP relaxation; this scheme may be useful for other capacitated covering problems. We also complement these bi-criteria approximations by obtaining hardness of approximation results that shed light on our understanding of these problems
The Container Selection Problem
We introduce and study a network resource management problem that is a special case of non-metric k-median, naturally arising in cross platform scheduling and cloud computing. In the continuous d-dimensional container selection problem, we are given a set C of input points in d-dimensional Euclidean space, for some d >= 2, and a budget k. An input point p can be assigned to a "container point" c only if c dominates p in every dimension. The assignment cost is then equal to the L1-norm of the container point. The goal is to find k container points in the d-dimensional space, such that the total assignment cost for all input points is minimized. The discrete variant of the problem has one key distinction, namely, the container points must be chosen from a given set F of points.
For the continuous version, we obtain a polynomial time approximation scheme for any fixed dimension d>= 2. On the negative side, we show that the problem is NP-hard for any d>=3. We further show that the discrete version is significantly harder, as it is NP-hard to approximate without violating the budget k in any dimension d>=3. Thus, we focus on obtaining bi-approximation algorithms. For d=2, the bi-approximation guarantee is (1+epsilon,3), i.e., for any epsilon>0, our scheme outputs a solution of size 3k and cost at most (1+epsilon) times the optimum. For fixed d>2, we present a (1+epsilon,O((1/epsilon)log k)) bi-approximation algorithm