4,874 research outputs found
On the intersection conjecture for infinite trees of matroids
Using a new technique, we prove a rich family of special cases of the matroid
intersection conjecture. Roughly, we prove the conjecture for pairs of tame
matroids which have a common decomposition by 2-separations into finite parts
Packing Returning Secretaries
We study online secretary problems with returns in combinatorial packing
domains with candidates that arrive sequentially over time in random order.
The goal is to accept a feasible packing of candidates of maximum total value.
In the first variant, each candidate arrives exactly twice. All arrivals
occur in random order. We propose a simple 0.5-competitive algorithm that can
be combined with arbitrary approximation algorithms for the packing domain,
even when the total value of candidates is a subadditive function. For
bipartite matching, we obtain an algorithm with competitive ratio at least
for growing , and an algorithm with ratio at least
for all . We extend all algorithms and ratios to arrivals
per candidate.
In the second variant, there is a pool of undecided candidates. In each
round, a random candidate from the pool arrives. Upon arrival a candidate can
be either decided (accept/reject) or postponed (returned into the pool). We
mainly focus on minimizing the expected number of postponements when computing
an optimal solution. An expected number of is always
sufficient. For matroids, we show that the expected number can be reduced to
, where is the minimum of the ranks of matroid and
dual matroid. For bipartite matching, we show a bound of , where
is the size of the optimum matching. For general packing, we show a lower
bound of , even when the size of the optimum is .Comment: 23 pages, 5 figure
Hamilton cycles in graphs and hypergraphs: an extremal perspective
As one of the most fundamental and well-known NP-complete problems, the
Hamilton cycle problem has been the subject of intensive research. Recent
developments in the area have highlighted the crucial role played by the
notions of expansion and quasi-randomness. These concepts and other recent
techniques have led to the solution of several long-standing problems in the
area. New aspects have also emerged, such as resilience, robustness and the
study of Hamilton cycles in hypergraphs. We survey these developments and
highlight open problems, with an emphasis on extremal and probabilistic
approaches.Comment: to appear in the Proceedings of the ICM 2014; due to given page
limits, this final version is slightly shorter than the previous arxiv
versio
The cavity approach for Steiner trees packing problems
The Belief Propagation approximation, or cavity method, has been recently
applied to several combinatorial optimization problems in its zero-temperature
implementation, the max-sum algorithm. In particular, recent developments to
solve the edge-disjoint paths problem and the prize-collecting Steiner tree
problem on graphs have shown remarkable results for several classes of graphs
and for benchmark instances. Here we propose a generalization of these
techniques for two variants of the Steiner trees packing problem where multiple
"interacting" trees have to be sought within a given graph. Depending on the
interaction among trees we distinguish the vertex-disjoint Steiner trees
problem, where trees cannot share nodes, from the edge-disjoint Steiner trees
problem, where edges cannot be shared by trees but nodes can be members of
multiple trees. Several practical problems of huge interest in network design
can be mapped into these two variants, for instance, the physical design of
Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) chips. The formalism described here relies
on two components edge-variables that allows us to formulate a massage-passing
algorithm for the V-DStP and two algorithms for the E-DStP differing in the
scaling of the computational time with respect to some relevant parameters. We
will show that one of the two formalisms used for the edge-disjoint variant
allow us to map the max-sum update equations into a weighted maximum matching
problem over proper bipartite graphs. We developed a heuristic procedure based
on the max-sum equations that shows excellent performance in synthetic networks
(in particular outperforming standard multi-step greedy procedures by large
margins) and on large benchmark instances of VLSI for which the optimal
solution is known, on which the algorithm found the optimum in two cases and
the gap to optimality was never larger than 4 %
Complete Acyclic Colorings
We study two parameters that arise from the dichromatic number and the
vertex-arboricity in the same way that the achromatic number comes from the
chromatic number. The adichromatic number of a digraph is the largest number of
colors its vertices can be colored with such that every color induces an
acyclic subdigraph but merging any two colors yields a monochromatic directed
cycle. Similarly, the a-vertex arboricity of an undirected graph is the largest
number of colors that can be used such that every color induces a forest but
merging any two yields a monochromatic cycle. We study the relation between
these parameters and their behavior with respect to other classical parameters
such as degeneracy and most importantly feedback vertex sets.Comment: 17 pages, no figure
On perfect packings in dense graphs
We say that a graph G has a perfect H-packing if there exists a set of
vertex-disjoint copies of H which cover all the vertices in G. We consider
various problems concerning perfect H-packings: Given positive integers n, r,
D, we characterise the edge density threshold that ensures a perfect
K_r-packing in any graph G on n vertices and with minimum degree at least D. We
also give two conjectures concerning degree sequence conditions which force a
graph to contain a perfect H-packing. Other related embedding problems are also
considered. Indeed, we give a structural result concerning K_r-free graphs that
satisfy a certain degree sequence condition.Comment: 18 pages, 1 figure. Electronic Journal of Combinatorics 20(1) (2013)
#P57. This version contains an open problem sectio
Long path and cycle decompositions of even hypercubes
We consider edge decompositions of the -dimensional hypercube into
isomorphic copies of a given graph . While a number of results are known
about decomposing into graphs from various classes, the simplest cases of
paths and cycles of a given length are far from being understood. A conjecture
of Erde asserts that if is even, and divides the number
of edges of , then the path of length decomposes . Tapadia et
al.\ proved that any path of length , where , satisfying these
conditions decomposes . Here, we make progress toward resolving Erde's
conjecture by showing that cycles of certain lengths up to
decompose . As a consequence, we show that can be decomposed into
copies of any path of length at most dividing the number of edges of
, thereby settling Erde's conjecture up to a linear factor
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