507 research outputs found
Local Guarantees in Graph Cuts and Clustering
Correlation Clustering is an elegant model that captures fundamental graph
cut problems such as Min Cut, Multiway Cut, and Multicut, extensively
studied in combinatorial optimization. Here, we are given a graph with edges
labeled or and the goal is to produce a clustering that agrees with the
labels as much as possible: edges within clusters and edges across
clusters. The classical approach towards Correlation Clustering (and other
graph cut problems) is to optimize a global objective. We depart from this and
study local objectives: minimizing the maximum number of disagreements for
edges incident on a single node, and the analogous max min agreements
objective. This naturally gives rise to a family of basic min-max graph cut
problems. A prototypical representative is Min Max Cut: find an cut
minimizing the largest number of cut edges incident on any node. We present the
following results: an -approximation for the problem of
minimizing the maximum total weight of disagreement edges incident on any node
(thus providing the first known approximation for the above family of min-max
graph cut problems), a remarkably simple -approximation for minimizing
local disagreements in complete graphs (improving upon the previous best known
approximation of ), and a -approximation for
maximizing the minimum total weight of agreement edges incident on any node,
hence improving upon the -approximation that follows from
the study of approximate pure Nash equilibria in cut and party affiliation
games
Directed Multicut with linearly ordered terminals
Motivated by an application in network security, we investigate the following
"linear" case of Directed Mutlicut. Let be a directed graph which includes
some distinguished vertices . What is the size of the
smallest edge cut which eliminates all paths from to for all ? We show that this problem is fixed-parameter tractable when parametrized in
the cutset size via an algorithm running in time.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figur
Linear-Time FPT Algorithms via Network Flow
In the area of parameterized complexity, to cope with NP-Hard problems, we
introduce a parameter k besides the input size n, and we aim to design
algorithms (called FPT algorithms) that run in O(f(k)n^d) time for some
function f(k) and constant d. Though FPT algorithms have been successfully
designed for many problems, typically they are not sufficiently fast because of
huge f(k) and d. In this paper, we give FPT algorithms with small f(k) and d
for many important problems including Odd Cycle Transversal and Almost 2-SAT.
More specifically, we can choose f(k) as a single exponential (4^k) and d as
one, that is, linear in the input size. To the best of our knowledge, our
algorithms achieve linear time complexity for the first time for these
problems. To obtain our algorithms for these problems, we consider a large
class of integer programs, called BIP2. Then we show that, in linear time, we
can reduce BIP2 to Vertex Cover Above LP preserving the parameter k, and we can
compute an optimal LP solution for Vertex Cover Above LP using network flow.
Then, we perform an exhaustive search by fixing half-integral values in the
optimal LP solution for Vertex Cover Above LP. A bottleneck here is that we
need to recompute an LP optimal solution after branching. To address this
issue, we exploit network flow to update the optimal LP solution in linear
time.Comment: 20 page
Tight Bounds for Gomory-Hu-like Cut Counting
By a classical result of Gomory and Hu (1961), in every edge-weighted graph
, the minimum -cut values, when ranging over all ,
take at most distinct values. That is, these instances
exhibit redundancy factor . They further showed how to construct
from a tree that stores all minimum -cut values. Motivated
by this result, we obtain tight bounds for the redundancy factor of several
generalizations of the minimum -cut problem.
1. Group-Cut: Consider the minimum -cut, ranging over all subsets
of given sizes and . The redundancy
factor is .
2. Multiway-Cut: Consider the minimum cut separating every two vertices of
, ranging over all subsets of a given size . The
redundancy factor is .
3. Multicut: Consider the minimum cut separating every demand-pair in
, ranging over collections of demand pairs. The
redundancy factor is . This result is a bit surprising, as
the redundancy factor is much larger than in the first two problems.
A natural application of these bounds is to construct small data structures
that stores all relevant cut values, like the Gomory-Hu tree. We initiate this
direction by giving some upper and lower bounds.Comment: This version contains additional references to previous work (which
have some overlap with our results), see Bibliographic Update 1.
Global and Fixed-Terminal Cuts in Digraphs
The computational complexity of multicut-like problems may vary significantly depending on whether the terminals are fixed or not. In this work we present a comprehensive study of this phenomenon in two types of cut problems in directed graphs: double cut and bicut.
1. Fixed-terminal edge-weighted double cut is known to be solvable efficiently. We show that fixed-terminal node-weighted double cut cannot be approximated to a factor smaller than 2 under the Unique Games Conjecture (UGC), and we also give a 2-approximation algorithm. For the global version of the problem, we prove an inapproximability bound of 3/2 under UGC.
2. Fixed-terminal edge-weighted bicut is known to have an approximability factor of 2 that is tight under UGC. We show that the global edge-weighted bicut is approximable to
a factor strictly better than 2, and that the global node-weighted bicut cannot be approximated to a factor smaller than 3/2 under UGC.
3. In relation to these investigations, we also prove two results on undirected graphs which are of independent interest. First, we show NP-completeness and a tight inapproximability bound of 4/3 for the node-weighted 3-cut problem under UGC. Second, we show that for constant k, there exists an efficient algorithm to solve the minimum {s,t}-separating k-cut problem.
Our techniques for the algorithms are combinatorial, based on LPs and based on the enumeration of approximate min-cuts. Our hardness results are based on combinatorial reductions and integrality gap instances
Rounding Algorithms for a Geometric Embedding of Minimum Multiway Cut
The multiway-cut problem is, given a weighted graph and k >= 2 terminal
nodes, to find a minimum-weight set of edges whose removal separates all the
terminals. The problem is NP-hard, and even NP-hard to approximate within
1+delta for some small delta > 0.
Calinescu, Karloff, and Rabani (1998) gave an algorithm with performance
guarantee 3/2-1/k, based on a geometric relaxation of the problem. In this
paper, we give improved randomized rounding schemes for their relaxation,
yielding a 12/11-approximation algorithm for k=3 and a 1.3438-approximation
algorithm in general.
Our approach hinges on the observation that the problem of designing a
randomized rounding scheme for a geometric relaxation is itself a linear
programming problem. The paper explores computational solutions to this
problem, and gives a proof that for a general class of geometric relaxations,
there are always randomized rounding schemes that match the integrality gap.Comment: Conference version in ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (1999). To
appear in Mathematics of Operations Researc
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