44 research outputs found
Symmetric Submodular Function Minimization Under Hereditary Family Constraints
We present an efficient algorithm to find non-empty minimizers of a symmetric
submodular function over any family of sets closed under inclusion. This for
example includes families defined by a cardinality constraint, a knapsack
constraint, a matroid independence constraint, or any combination of such
constraints. Our algorithm make oracle calls to the submodular
function where is the cardinality of the ground set. In contrast, the
problem of minimizing a general submodular function under a cardinality
constraint is known to be inapproximable within (Svitkina
and Fleischer [2008]).
The algorithm is similar to an algorithm of Nagamochi and Ibaraki [1998] to
find all nontrivial inclusionwise minimal minimizers of a symmetric submodular
function over a set of cardinality using oracle calls. Their
procedure in turn is based on Queyranne's algorithm [1998] to minimize a
symmetric submodularComment: 13 pages, Submitted to SODA 201
A Combinatorial, Strongly Polynomial-Time Algorithm for Minimizing Submodular Functions
This paper presents the first combinatorial polynomial-time algorithm for
minimizing submodular set functions, answering an open question posed in 1981
by Grotschel, Lovasz, and Schrijver. The algorithm employs a scaling scheme
that uses a flow in the complete directed graph on the underlying set with each
arc capacity equal to the scaled parameter. The resulting algorithm runs in
time bounded by a polynomial in the size of the underlying set and the largest
length of the function value. The paper also presents a strongly
polynomial-time version that runs in time bounded by a polynomial in the size
of the underlying set independent of the function value.Comment: 17 page
Almost-Tight Distributed Minimum Cut Algorithms
We study the problem of computing the minimum cut in a weighted distributed
message-passing networks (the CONGEST model). Let be the minimum cut,
be the number of nodes in the network, and be the network diameter. Our
algorithm can compute exactly in time. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that
explicitly studies computing the exact minimum cut in the distributed setting.
Previously, non-trivial sublinear time algorithms for this problem are known
only for unweighted graphs when due to Pritchard and
Thurimella's -time and -time algorithms for
computing -edge-connected and -edge-connected components.
By using the edge sampling technique of Karger's, we can convert this
algorithm into a -approximation -time algorithm for any . This improves
over the previous -approximation -time algorithm and
-approximation -time algorithm of Ghaffari and Kuhn. Due to the lower
bound of by Das Sarma et al. which holds for any
approximation algorithm, this running time is tight up to a factor.
To get the stated running time, we developed an approximation algorithm which
combines the ideas of Thorup's algorithm and Matula's contraction algorithm. It
saves an factor as compared to applying Thorup's tree
packing theorem directly. Then, we combine Kutten and Peleg's tree partitioning
algorithm and Karger's dynamic programming to achieve an efficient distributed
algorithm that finds the minimum cut when we are given a spanning tree that
crosses the minimum cut exactly once
A min-cut approach to functional regionalization, with a case study of the Italian local labour market areas
In several economical, statistical and geographical applications, a territory must be subdivided into functional regions.
Such regions are not fixed and politically delimited, but should be identified by analyzing the interactions among all its constituent localities.
This is a very delicate and important task, that often turns out to be computationally difficult.
In this work we propose an innovative approach to this problem based on the solution of minimum cut problems over an undirected graph called here transitions graph.
The proposed procedure guarantees that the obtained regions satisfy all the statistical conditions required when considering this type of problems.
Results on real-world instances show the effectiveness of the proposed approach
Practical Minimum Cut Algorithms
The minimum cut problem for an undirected edge-weighted graph asks us to
divide its set of nodes into two blocks while minimizing the weight sum of the
cut edges. Here, we introduce a linear-time algorithm to compute near-minimum
cuts. Our algorithm is based on cluster contraction using label propagation and
Padberg and Rinaldi's contraction heuristics [SIAM Review, 1991]. We give both
sequential and shared-memory parallel implementations of our algorithm.
Extensive experiments on both real-world and generated instances show that our
algorithm finds the optimal cut on nearly all instances significantly faster
than other state-of-the-art algorithms while our error rate is lower than that
of other heuristic algorithms. In addition, our parallel algorithm shows good
scalability
Blocking optimal -arborescences
Given a digraph and a positive integer , an arc set is called a \textbf{-arborescence} if it is the disjoint union of
spanning arborescences. The problem of finding a minimum cost -arborescence
is known to be polynomial-time solvable using matroid intersection. In this
paper we study the following problem: find a minimum cardinality subset of arcs
that contains at least one arc from every minimum cost -arborescence. For
, the problem was solved in [A. Bern\'ath, G. Pap , Blocking optimal
arborescences, IPCO 2013]. In this paper we give an algorithm for general
that has polynomial running time if is fixed