63 research outputs found
The interval constrained 3-coloring problem
In this paper, we settle the open complexity status of interval constrained
coloring with a fixed number of colors. We prove that the problem is already
NP-complete if the number of different colors is 3. Previously, it has only
been known that it is NP-complete, if the number of colors is part of the input
and that the problem is solvable in polynomial time, if the number of colors is
at most 2. We also show that it is hard to satisfy almost all of the
constraints for a feasible instance.Comment: minor revisio
Improved Approximation Algorithms for Stochastic Matching
In this paper we consider the Stochastic Matching problem, which is motivated
by applications in kidney exchange and online dating. We are given an
undirected graph in which every edge is assigned a probability of existence and
a positive profit, and each node is assigned a positive integer called timeout.
We know whether an edge exists or not only after probing it. On this random
graph we are executing a process, which one-by-one probes the edges and
gradually constructs a matching. The process is constrained in two ways: once
an edge is taken it cannot be removed from the matching, and the timeout of
node upper-bounds the number of edges incident to that can be probed.
The goal is to maximize the expected profit of the constructed matching.
For this problem Bansal et al. (Algorithmica 2012) provided a
-approximation algorithm for bipartite graphs, and a -approximation for
general graphs. In this work we improve the approximation factors to
and , respectively.
We also consider an online version of the bipartite case, where one side of
the partition arrives node by node, and each time a node arrives we have to
decide which edges incident to we want to probe, and in which order. Here
we present a -approximation, improving on the -approximation of
Bansal et al.
The main technical ingredient in our result is a novel way of probing edges
according to a random but non-uniform permutation. Patching this method with an
algorithm that works best for large probability edges (plus some additional
ideas) leads to our improved approximation factors
Detecting Activations over Graphs using Spanning Tree Wavelet Bases
We consider the detection of activations over graphs under Gaussian noise,
where signals are piece-wise constant over the graph. Despite the wide
applicability of such a detection algorithm, there has been little success in
the development of computationally feasible methods with proveable theoretical
guarantees for general graph topologies. We cast this as a hypothesis testing
problem, and first provide a universal necessary condition for asymptotic
distinguishability of the null and alternative hypotheses. We then introduce
the spanning tree wavelet basis over graphs, a localized basis that reflects
the topology of the graph, and prove that for any spanning tree, this approach
can distinguish null from alternative in a low signal-to-noise regime. Lastly,
we improve on this result and show that using the uniform spanning tree in the
basis construction yields a randomized test with stronger theoretical
guarantees that in many cases matches our necessary conditions. Specifically,
we obtain near-optimal performance in edge transitive graphs, -nearest
neighbor graphs, and -graphs
Lift-and-Round to Improve Weighted Completion Time on Unrelated Machines
We consider the problem of scheduling jobs on unrelated machines so as to
minimize the sum of weighted completion times. Our main result is a
-approximation algorithm for some fixed , improving upon the
long-standing bound of 3/2 (independently due to Skutella, Journal of the ACM,
2001, and Sethuraman & Squillante, SODA, 1999). To do this, we first introduce
a new lift-and-project based SDP relaxation for the problem. This is necessary
as the previous convex programming relaxations have an integrality gap of
. Second, we give a new general bipartite-rounding procedure that produces
an assignment with certain strong negative correlation properties.Comment: 21 pages, 4 figure
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