506,584 research outputs found
Approximating the MaxCover Problem with Bounded Frequencies in FPT Time
We study approximation algorithms for several variants of the MaxCover
problem, with the focus on algorithms that run in FPT time. In the MaxCover
problem we are given a set N of elements, a family S of subsets of N, and an
integer K. The goal is to find up to K sets from S that jointly cover (i.e.,
include) as many elements as possible. This problem is well-known to be NP-hard
and, under standard complexity-theoretic assumptions, the best possible
polynomial-time approximation algorithm has approximation ratio (1 - 1/e). We
first consider a variant of MaxCover with bounded element frequencies, i.e., a
variant where there is a constant p such that each element belongs to at most p
sets in S. For this case we show that there is an FPT approximation scheme
(i.e., for each B there is a B-approximation algorithm running in FPT time) for
the problem of maximizing the number of covered elements, and a randomized FPT
approximation scheme for the problem of minimizing the number of elements left
uncovered (we take K to be the parameter). Then, for the case where there is a
constant p such that each element belongs to at least p sets from S, we show
that the standard greedy approximation algorithm achieves approximation ratio
exactly (1-e^{-max(pK/|S|, 1)}). We conclude by considering an unrestricted
variant of MaxCover, and show approximation algorithms that run in exponential
time and combine an exact algorithm with a greedy approximation. Some of our
results improve currently known results for MaxVertexCover
Explicit universal sampling sets in finite vector spaces
In this paper we construct explicit sampling sets and present reconstruction
algorithms for Fourier signals on finite vector spaces , with for
a suitable prime . The two sets have sizes of order and
respectively, where is the number of large coefficients
in the Fourier transform. The algorithms approximate the function up to a small
constant of the best possible approximation with non-zero Fourier
coefficients. The fastest of the algorithms has complexity
Graph Homomorphism Revisited for Graph Matching
In a variety of emerging applications one needs to decide whether a graph
G matches
another
G
p
,
i.e.
, whether
G
has a topological structure similar to that of
G
p
. The traditional notions of graph homomorphism and isomorphism often fall short of capturing the structural similarity in these applications. This paper studies revisions of these notions, providing a full treatment from complexity to algorithms. (1) We propose
p-homomorphism (p
-hom) and 1-1
p
-hom, which extend graph homomorphism and subgraph isomorphism, respectively, by mapping
edges
from one graph to
paths
in another, and by measuring
the similarity of nodes
. (2) We introduce metrics to measure graph similarity, and several optimization problems for
p
-hom and 1-1
p
-hom. (3) We show that the decision problems for
p
-hom and 1-1
p
-hom are NP-complete even for DAGs, and that the optimization problems are approximation-hard. (4) Nevertheless, we provide approximation algorithms with
provable guarantees
on match quality. We experimentally verify the effectiveness of the revised notions and the efficiency of our algorithms in Web site matching, using real-life and synthetic data.
</jats:p
An Integer Programming Approach to the Student-Project Allocation Problem with Preferences over Projects
The Student-Project Allocation problem with preferences over Projects (SPA-P) involves sets of students, projects and lecturers, where the students and lecturers each have preferences over the projects. In this context, we typically seek a stable matching of students to projects (and lecturers). However, these stable matchings can have different sizes, and the problem of finding a maximum stable matching (MAX-SPA-P) is NP-hard. There are two known approximation algorithms for MAX-SPA-P, with performance guarantees of 2 and 32 . In this paper, we describe an Integer Programming (IP) model to enable MAX-SPA-P to be solved optimally. Following this, we present results arising from an empirical analysis that investigates how the solution produced by the approximation algorithms compares to the optimal solution obtained from the IP model, with respect to the size of the stable matchings constructed, on instances that are both randomly-generated and derived from real datasets. Our main finding is that the 32 -approximation algorithm finds stable matchings that are very close to having maximum cardinality
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