6,150 research outputs found
Parameterized Approximation Schemes using Graph Widths
Combining the techniques of approximation algorithms and parameterized
complexity has long been considered a promising research area, but relatively
few results are currently known. In this paper we study the parameterized
approximability of a number of problems which are known to be hard to solve
exactly when parameterized by treewidth or clique-width. Our main contribution
is to present a natural randomized rounding technique that extends well-known
ideas and can be used for both of these widths. Applying this very generic
technique we obtain approximation schemes for a number of problems, evading
both polynomial-time inapproximability and parameterized intractability bounds
A Fixed Parameter Tractable Approximation Scheme for the Optimal Cut Graph of a Surface
Given a graph cellularly embedded on a surface of genus , a
cut graph is a subgraph of such that cutting along yields a
topological disk. We provide a fixed parameter tractable approximation scheme
for the problem of computing the shortest cut graph, that is, for any
, we show how to compute a approximation of
the shortest cut graph in time .
Our techniques first rely on the computation of a spanner for the problem
using the technique of brick decompositions, to reduce the problem to the case
of bounded tree-width. Then, to solve the bounded tree-width case, we introduce
a variant of the surface-cut decomposition of Ru\'e, Sau and Thilikos, which
may be of independent interest
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