4,582 research outputs found
Approximating the least hypervolume contributor: NP-hard in general, but fast in practice
The hypervolume indicator is an increasingly popular set measure to compare
the quality of two Pareto sets. The basic ingredient of most hypervolume
indicator based optimization algorithms is the calculation of the hypervolume
contribution of single solutions regarding a Pareto set. We show that exact
calculation of the hypervolume contribution is #P-hard while its approximation
is NP-hard. The same holds for the calculation of the minimal contribution. We
also prove that it is NP-hard to decide whether a solution has the least
hypervolume contribution. Even deciding whether the contribution of a solution
is at most (1+\eps) times the minimal contribution is NP-hard. This implies
that it is neither possible to efficiently find the least contributing solution
(unless ) nor to approximate it (unless ).
Nevertheless, in the second part of the paper we present a fast approximation
algorithm for this problem. We prove that for arbitrarily given \eps,\delta>0
it calculates a solution with contribution at most (1+\eps) times the minimal
contribution with probability at least . Though it cannot run in
polynomial time for all instances, it performs extremely fast on various
benchmark datasets. The algorithm solves very large problem instances which are
intractable for exact algorithms (e.g., 10000 solutions in 100 dimensions)
within a few seconds.Comment: 22 pages, to appear in Theoretical Computer Scienc
Polylogarithmic Approximation for Generalized Minimum Manhattan Networks
Given a set of terminals, which are points in -dimensional Euclidean
space, the minimum Manhattan network problem (MMN) asks for a minimum-length
rectilinear network that connects each pair of terminals by a Manhattan path,
that is, a path consisting of axis-parallel segments whose total length equals
the pair's Manhattan distance. Even for , the problem is NP-hard, but
constant-factor approximations are known. For , the problem is
APX-hard; it is known to admit, for any \eps > 0, an
O(n^\eps)-approximation.
In the generalized minimum Manhattan network problem (GMMN), we are given a
set of terminal pairs, and the goal is to find a minimum-length
rectilinear network such that each pair in is connected by a Manhattan
path. GMMN is a generalization of both MMN and the well-known rectilinear
Steiner arborescence problem (RSA). So far, only special cases of GMMN have
been considered.
We present an -approximation algorithm for GMMN (and, hence,
MMN) in dimensions and an -approximation algorithm for 2D.
We show that an existing -approximation algorithm for RSA in 2D
generalizes easily to dimensions.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures; added appendix and figure
Hyperorthogonal well-folded Hilbert curves
R-trees can be used to store and query sets of point data in two or more
dimensions. An easy way to construct and maintain R-trees for two-dimensional
points, due to Kamel and Faloutsos, is to keep the points in the order in which
they appear along the Hilbert curve. The R-tree will then store bounding boxes
of points along contiguous sections of the curve, and the efficiency of the
R-tree depends on the size of the bounding boxes---smaller is better. Since
there are many different ways to generalize the Hilbert curve to higher
dimensions, this raises the question which generalization results in the
smallest bounding boxes. Familiar methods, such as the one by Butz, can result
in curve sections whose bounding boxes are a factor larger
than the volume traversed by that section of the curve. Most of the volume
bounded by such bounding boxes would not contain any data points. In this paper
we present a new way of generalizing Hilbert's curve to higher dimensions,
which results in much tighter bounding boxes: they have at most 4 times the
volume of the part of the curve covered, independent of the number of
dimensions. Moreover, we prove that a factor 4 is asymptotically optimal.Comment: Manuscript submitted to Journal of Computational Geometry. An
abstract appeared in the 31st Int Symp on Computational Geometry (SoCG 2015),
LIPIcs 34:812-82
Approximating Smallest Containers for Packing Three-dimensional Convex Objects
We investigate the problem of computing a minimal-volume container for the
non-overlapping packing of a given set of three-dimensional convex objects.
Already the simplest versions of the problem are NP-hard so that we cannot
expect to find exact polynomial time algorithms. We give constant ratio
approximation algorithms for packing axis-parallel (rectangular) cuboids under
translation into an axis-parallel (rectangular) cuboid as container, for
cuboids under rigid motions into an axis-parallel cuboid or into an arbitrary
convex container, and for packing convex polyhedra under rigid motions into an
axis-parallel cuboid or arbitrary convex container. This work gives the first
approximability results for the computation of minimal volume containers for
the objects described
- …