14,388 research outputs found
Fat Polygonal Partitions with Applications to Visualization and Embeddings
Let be a rooted and weighted tree, where the weight of any node
is equal to the sum of the weights of its children. The popular Treemap
algorithm visualizes such a tree as a hierarchical partition of a square into
rectangles, where the area of the rectangle corresponding to any node in
is equal to the weight of that node. The aspect ratio of the
rectangles in such a rectangular partition necessarily depends on the weights
and can become arbitrarily high.
We introduce a new hierarchical partition scheme, called a polygonal
partition, which uses convex polygons rather than just rectangles. We present
two methods for constructing polygonal partitions, both having guarantees on
the worst-case aspect ratio of the constructed polygons; in particular, both
methods guarantee a bound on the aspect ratio that is independent of the
weights of the nodes.
We also consider rectangular partitions with slack, where the areas of the
rectangles may differ slightly from the weights of the corresponding nodes. We
show that this makes it possible to obtain partitions with constant aspect
ratio. This result generalizes to hyper-rectangular partitions in
. We use these partitions with slack for embedding ultrametrics
into -dimensional Euclidean space: we give a -approximation algorithm for embedding -point ultrametrics
into with minimum distortion, where denotes the spread
of the metric, i.e., the ratio between the largest and the smallest distance
between two points. The previously best-known approximation ratio for this
problem was polynomial in . This is the first algorithm for embedding a
non-trivial family of weighted-graph metrics into a space of constant dimension
that achieves polylogarithmic approximation ratio.Comment: 26 page
Fixed-Parameter Algorithms for Rectilinear Steiner tree and Rectilinear Traveling Salesman Problem in the plane
Given a set of points with their pairwise distances, the traveling
salesman problem (TSP) asks for a shortest tour that visits each point exactly
once. A TSP instance is rectilinear when the points lie in the plane and the
distance considered between two points is the distance. In this paper, a
fixed-parameter algorithm for the Rectilinear TSP is presented and relies on
techniques for solving TSP on bounded-treewidth graphs. It proves that the
problem can be solved in where denotes the
number of horizontal lines containing the points of . The same technique can
be directly applied to the problem of finding a shortest rectilinear Steiner
tree that interconnects the points of providing a
time complexity. Both bounds improve over the best time bounds known for these
problems.Comment: 24 pages, 13 figures, 6 table
On the Duality of Semiantichains and Unichain Coverings
We study a min-max relation conjectured by Saks and West: For any two posets
and the size of a maximum semiantichain and the size of a minimum
unichain covering in the product are equal. For positive we state
conditions on and that imply the min-max relation. Based on these
conditions we identify some new families of posets where the conjecture holds
and get easy proofs for several instances where the conjecture had been
verified before. However, we also have examples showing that in general the
min-max relation is false, i.e., we disprove the Saks-West conjecture.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure
Move-minimizing puzzles, diamond-colored modular and distributive lattices, and poset models for Weyl group symmetric functions
The move-minimizing puzzles presented here are certain types of one-player
combinatorial games that are shown to have explicit solutions whenever they can
be encoded in a certain way as diamond-colored modular and distributive
lattices. Such lattices can also arise naturally as models for certain
algebraic objects, namely Weyl group symmetric functions and their companion
semisimple Lie algebra representations. The motivation for this paper is
therefore both diversional and algebraic: To show how some recreational
move-minimizing puzzles can be solved explicitly within an order-theoretic
context and also to realize some such puzzles as combinatorial models for
symmetric functions associated with certain fundamental representations of the
symplectic and odd orthogonal Lie algebras
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