850 research outputs found
Vertex Cover Kernelization Revisited: Upper and Lower Bounds for a Refined Parameter
An important result in the study of polynomial-time preprocessing shows that
there is an algorithm which given an instance (G,k) of Vertex Cover outputs an
equivalent instance (G',k') in polynomial time with the guarantee that G' has
at most 2k' vertices (and thus O((k')^2) edges) with k' <= k. Using the
terminology of parameterized complexity we say that k-Vertex Cover has a kernel
with 2k vertices. There is complexity-theoretic evidence that both 2k vertices
and Theta(k^2) edges are optimal for the kernel size. In this paper we consider
the Vertex Cover problem with a different parameter, the size fvs(G) of a
minimum feedback vertex set for G. This refined parameter is structurally
smaller than the parameter k associated to the vertex covering number vc(G)
since fvs(G) <= vc(G) and the difference can be arbitrarily large. We give a
kernel for Vertex Cover with a number of vertices that is cubic in fvs(G): an
instance (G,X,k) of Vertex Cover, where X is a feedback vertex set for G, can
be transformed in polynomial time into an equivalent instance (G',X',k') such
that |V(G')| <= 2k and |V(G')| <= O(|X'|^3). A similar result holds when the
feedback vertex set X is not given along with the input. In sharp contrast we
show that the Weighted Vertex Cover problem does not have a polynomial kernel
when parameterized by the cardinality of a given vertex cover of the graph
unless NP is in coNP/poly and the polynomial hierarchy collapses to the third
level.Comment: Published in "Theory of Computing Systems" as an Open Access
publicatio
Rectangular Layouts and Contact Graphs
Contact graphs of isothetic rectangles unify many concepts from applications
including VLSI and architectural design, computational geometry, and GIS.
Minimizing the area of their corresponding {\em rectangular layouts} is a key
problem. We study the area-optimization problem and show that it is NP-hard to
find a minimum-area rectangular layout of a given contact graph. We present
O(n)-time algorithms that construct -area rectangular layouts for
general contact graphs and -area rectangular layouts for trees.
(For trees, this is an -approximation algorithm.) We also present an
infinite family of graphs (rsp., trees) that require (rsp.,
) area.
We derive these results by presenting a new characterization of graphs that
admit rectangular layouts using the related concept of {\em rectangular duals}.
A corollary to our results relates the class of graphs that admit rectangular
layouts to {\em rectangle of influence drawings}.Comment: 28 pages, 13 figures, 55 references, 1 appendi
Navigability is a Robust Property
The Small World phenomenon has inspired researchers across a number of
fields. A breakthrough in its understanding was made by Kleinberg who
introduced Rank Based Augmentation (RBA): add to each vertex independently an
arc to a random destination selected from a carefully crafted probability
distribution. Kleinberg proved that RBA makes many networks navigable, i.e., it
allows greedy routing to successfully deliver messages between any two vertices
in a polylogarithmic number of steps. We prove that navigability is an inherent
property of many random networks, arising without coordination, or even
independence assumptions
Optimal Data Collection For Informative Rankings Expose Well-Connected Graphs
Given a graph where vertices represent alternatives and arcs represent
pairwise comparison data, the statistical ranking problem is to find a
potential function, defined on the vertices, such that the gradient of the
potential function agrees with the pairwise comparisons. Our goal in this paper
is to develop a method for collecting data for which the least squares
estimator for the ranking problem has maximal Fisher information. Our approach,
based on experimental design, is to view data collection as a bi-level
optimization problem where the inner problem is the ranking problem and the
outer problem is to identify data which maximizes the informativeness of the
ranking. Under certain assumptions, the data collection problem decouples,
reducing to a problem of finding multigraphs with large algebraic connectivity.
This reduction of the data collection problem to graph-theoretic questions is
one of the primary contributions of this work. As an application, we study the
Yahoo! Movie user rating dataset and demonstrate that the addition of a small
number of well-chosen pairwise comparisons can significantly increase the
Fisher informativeness of the ranking. As another application, we study the
2011-12 NCAA football schedule and propose schedules with the same number of
games which are significantly more informative. Using spectral clustering
methods to identify highly-connected communities within the division, we argue
that the NCAA could improve its notoriously poor rankings by simply scheduling
more out-of-conference games.Comment: 31 pages, 10 figures, 3 table
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 (-edge)-connected graph
and a set of extra edges (links), select a minimum cardinality subset of
links such that adding to increases its edge connectivity to .
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 , 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 ,
a.k.a. the Tree Augmentation Problem (TAP), for odd , and to the case ,
a.k.a. the Cactus Augmentation Problem (CacAP), for even . Several better
than approximation algorithms are known for TAP, culminating with a recent
approximation [Grandoni et al.'18]. However, for CacAP the best known
approximation is .
In this paper we breach the approximation barrier for CacAP, hence for
CAP, by presenting a polynomial-time
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 . 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
Geometric Biplane Graphs II: Graph Augmentation
We study biplane graphs drawn on a nite point set
S
in the plane in general position.
This is the family of geometric graphs whose vertex set is
S
and which can be decomposed
into two plane graphs. We show that every su ciently large point set admits a 5-connected
biplane graph and that there are arbitrarily large point sets that do not admit any 6-
connected biplane graph. Furthermore, we show that every plane graph (other than a
wheel or a fan) can be augmented into a 4-connected biplane graph. However, there are
arbitrarily large plane graphs that cannot be augmented to a 5-connected biplane graph
by adding pairwise noncrossing edges.Peer ReviewedPostprint (authorâs final draft
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