11 research outputs found
Applications of a new separator theorem for string graphs
An intersection graph of curves in the plane is called a string graph.
Matousek almost completely settled a conjecture of the authors by showing that
every string graph of m edges admits a vertex separator of size O(\sqrt{m}\log
m). In the present note, this bound is combined with a result of the authors,
according to which every dense string graph contains a large complete balanced
bipartite graph. Three applications are given concerning string graphs G with n
vertices: (i) if K_t is not a subgraph of G for some t, then the chromatic
number of G is at most (\log n)^{O(\log t)}; (ii) if K_{t,t} is not a subgraph
of G, then G has at most t(\log t)^{O(1)}n edges,; and (iii) a lopsided
Ramsey-type result, which shows that the Erdos-Hajnal conjecture almost holds
for string graphs.Comment: 7 page
Modularity of minor-free graphs
We prove that a class of graphs with an excluded minor and with the maximum
degree sublinear in the number of edges is maximally modular, that is,
modularity tends to 1 as the number of edges tends to infinity.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figur
Many Sparse Cuts via Higher Eigenvalues
Cheeger's fundamental inequality states that any edge-weighted graph has a
vertex subset such that its expansion (a.k.a. conductance) is bounded as
follows: \phi(S) \defeq \frac{w(S,\bar{S})}{\min \set{w(S), w(\bar{S})}}
\leq 2\sqrt{\lambda_2} where is the total edge weight of a subset or a
cut and is the second smallest eigenvalue of the normalized
Laplacian of the graph. Here we prove the following natural generalization: for
any integer , there exist disjoint subsets ,
such that where
is the smallest eigenvalue of the normalized Laplacian and
are suitable absolute constants. Our proof is via a polynomial-time
algorithm to find such subsets, consisting of a spectral projection and a
randomized rounding. As a consequence, we get the same upper bound for the
small set expansion problem, namely for any , there is a subset whose
weight is at most a \bigO(1/k) fraction of the total weight and . Both results are the best possible up to constant
factors.
The underlying algorithmic problem, namely finding subsets such that the
maximum expansion is minimized, besides extending sparse cuts to more than one
subset, appears to be a natural clustering problem in its own right
Improved Cheeger's Inequality: Analysis of Spectral Partitioning Algorithms through Higher Order Spectral Gap
Let \phi(G) be the minimum conductance of an undirected graph G, and let
0=\lambda_1 <= \lambda_2 <=... <= \lambda_n <= 2 be the eigenvalues of the
normalized Laplacian matrix of G. We prove that for any graph G and any k >= 2,
\phi(G) = O(k) \lambda_2 / \sqrt{\lambda_k}, and this performance guarantee
is achieved by the spectral partitioning algorithm. This improves Cheeger's
inequality, and the bound is optimal up to a constant factor for any k. Our
result shows that the spectral partitioning algorithm is a constant factor
approximation algorithm for finding a sparse cut if \lambda_k$ is a constant
for some constant k. This provides some theoretical justification to its
empirical performance in image segmentation and clustering problems. We extend
the analysis to other graph partitioning problems, including multi-way
partition, balanced separator, and maximum cut
Structured recursive separator decompositions for planar graphs in linear time (Extended Abstract)
Given a triangulated planar graph G on n vertices and an integer r < n, an r-division of G with few holes is a decomposition of G into O(n/r) regions of size at most r such that each region contains at most a constant number of faces that are not faces of G (also called holes), and such that, for each region, the total number of vertices on these faces is O( â r). We provide an algorithm for computing r-divisions with few holes in linear time. In fact, our algorithm computes a structure, called decomposition tree, which represents a recursive decomposition of G that includes r-divisions for essentially all values of r. In particular, given an exponentially increasing sequence r = (r1, r2, ...), our algorithm can produce a recursive r-division with few holes in linear time. r-divisions with few holes have been used in efficient algorithms to compute shortest paths, minimum cuts, and maximum flows. Our linear-time algorithm improves upon the decomposition algorithm used in the state-of-the-art algorithm for minimum st-cut (Italiano, Nussbaum, Sankowski, and Wulff-Nilsen, STOC 2011), removing one of the bottlenecks in the overall running time of their algorithm (analogously for minimum cut in planar and bounded-genus graphs)