On the maximum size of a minimal k-edge connected augmentation

AbstractWe present a short proof of a generalization of a result of Cheriyan and Thurimella: a simple graph of minimum degree k can be augmented to a k-edge connected simple graph by adding ⩽knk+1 edges, where n is the number of nodes. One application (from the previous paper) is an approximation algorithm with a guarantee of 1+2k+1 for the following NP-hard problem: given a simple undirected graph, find a minimum-size k-edge connected spanning subgraph. For the special cases of k=4,5,6, this is the best approximation guarantee known

Breaching the 2-Approximation Barrier for Connectivity Augmentation: a Reduction to Steiner Tree

The basic goal of survivable network design is to build a cheap network that maintains the connectivity between given sets of nodes despite the failure of a few edges/nodes. The Connectivity Augmentation Problem (CAP) is arguably one of the most basic problems in this area: given a $k$(-edge)-connected graph $G$ and a set of extra edges (links), select a minimum cardinality subset $A$ of links such that adding $A$ to $G$ increases its edge connectivity to $k+1$. Intuitively, one wants to make an existing network more reliable by augmenting it with extra edges. The best known approximation factor for this NP-hard problem is $2$, and this can be achieved with multiple approaches (the first such result is in [Frederickson and J\'aj\'a'81]). It is known [Dinitz et al.'76] that CAP can be reduced to the case $k=1$, a.k.a. the Tree Augmentation Problem (TAP), for odd $k$, and to the case $k=2$, a.k.a. the Cactus Augmentation Problem (CacAP), for even $k$. Several better than $2$ approximation algorithms are known for TAP, culminating with a recent $1.458$ approximation [Grandoni et al.'18]. However, for CacAP the best known approximation is $2$. In this paper we breach the $2$ approximation barrier for CacAP, hence for CAP, by presenting a polynomial-time $2\ln(4)-\frac{967}{1120}+\epsilon<1.91$ approximation. Previous approaches exploit properties of TAP that do not seem to generalize to CacAP. We instead use a reduction to the Steiner tree problem which was previously used in parameterized algorithms [Basavaraju et al.'14]. This reduction is not approximation preserving, and using the current best approximation factor for Steiner tree [Byrka et al.'13] as a black-box would not be good enough to improve on $2$. To achieve the latter goal, we ``open the box'' and exploit the specific properties of the instances of Steiner tree arising from CacAP.Comment: Corrected a typo in the abstract (in metadata

Graph Connectivity: Approximation Algorithms and Applications to Protein-Protein Interaction Networks

A graph is connected if there is a path between any two of its vertices and k-connected if there are at least k disjoint paths between any two vertices. A graph is k-edge-connected if none of the k paths share any edges and k-vertex-connected (or k-connected) if they do not share any intermediate vertices. We examine some problems related to k-connectivity and an application. We have looked at the k-edge-connected spanning subgraph problem: given a k-edge-connected graph, find the smallest subgraph that includes all vertices and is still k-edge-connected. We improved two algorithms for approximating solutions to this problem. The first algorithm transforms the problem into an integer linear program, relaxes it into a real-valued linear program and solves it, then obtains an approximate solution to the original problem by rounding non-integer values. We have improved the approximation ratio by giving a better scheme for rounding the edges and bounding the number of fractional edges. The second algorithm finds a subgraph where every vertex has a minimum degree, then augments the subgraph by adding edges until it is k-edgeconnected. We improve this algorithm by bounding the number of edges that could be added in the augmentation step. We have also applied the idea of k-connectivity to protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks, biological graphs where vertices represent proteins and edges represent experimentally determined physical interactions. Because few PPI networks are even 1-connected, we have looked for highly connected subgraphs of these graphs. We developed algorithms to find the most highly connected subgraphs of a graph. We applied our algorithms to a large network of yeast protein interactions and found that the most highly connected subgraph was a 16-connected subgraph of membrane proteins that had never before been identified as a module and is of interest to biologists. We also looked at graphs of proteins known to be co-complexed and found that a significant number contained 3- connected subgraphs, one of the features that most differentiated complexes from random graphs

Linear Programming Tools and Approximation Algorithms for Combinatorial Optimization

We study techniques, approximation algorithms, structural properties and lower bounds related to applications of linear programs in combinatorial optimization. The following "Steiner tree problem" is central: given a graph with a distinguished subset of required vertices, and costs for each edge, find a minimum-cost subgraph that connects the required vertices. We also investigate the areas of network design, multicommodity flows, and packing/covering integer programs. All of these problems are NP-complete so it is natural to seek approximation algorithms with the best provable approximation ratio. Overall, we show some new techniques that enhance the already-substantial corpus of LP-based approximation methods, and we also look for limitations of these techniques. The first half of the thesis deals with linear programming relaxations for the Steiner tree problem. The crux of our work deals with hypergraphic relaxations obtained via the well-known full component decomposition of Steiner trees; explicitly, in this view the fundamental building blocks are not edges, but hyperedges containing two or more required vertices. We introduce a new hypergraphic LP based on partitions. We show the new LP has the same value as several previously-studied hypergraphic ones; when no Steiner nodes are adjacent, we show that the value of the well-known bidirected cut relaxation is also the same. A new partition uncrossing technique is used to demonstrate these equivalences, and to show that extreme points of the new LP are well-structured. We improve the best known integrality gap on these LPs in some special cases. We show that several approximation algorithms from the literature on Steiner trees can be re-interpreted through linear programs, in particular our hypergraphic relaxation yields a new view of the Robins-Zelikovsky 1.55-approximation algorithm for the Steiner tree problem. The second half of the thesis deals with a variety of fundamental problems in combinatorial optimization. We show how to apply the iterated LP relaxation framework to the problem of multicommodity integral flow in a tree, to get an approximation ratio that is asymptotically optimal in terms of the minimum capacity. Iterated relaxation gives an infeasible solution, so we need to finesse it back to feasibility without losing too much value. Iterated LP relaxation similarly gives an O(k^2)-approximation algorithm for packing integer programs with at most k occurrences of each variable; new LP rounding techniques give a k-approximation algorithm for covering integer programs with at most k variable per constraint. We study extreme points of the standard LP relaxation for the traveling salesperson problem and show that they can be much more complex than was previously known. The k-edge-connected spanning multi-subgraph problem has the same LP and we prove a lower bound and conjecture an upper bound on the approximability of variants of this problem. Finally, we show that for packing/covering integer programs with a bounded number of constraints, for any epsilon > 0, there is an LP with integrality gap at most 1 + epsilon