19 research outputs found
Sparsest Cut on Bounded Treewidth Graphs: Algorithms and Hardness Results
We give a 2-approximation algorithm for Non-Uniform Sparsest Cut that runs in
time , where is the treewidth of the graph. This improves on the
previous -approximation in time \poly(n) 2^{O(k)} due to
Chlamt\'a\v{c} et al.
To complement this algorithm, we show the following hardness results: If the
Non-Uniform Sparsest Cut problem has a -approximation for series-parallel
graphs (where ), then the Max Cut problem has an algorithm with
approximation factor arbitrarily close to . Hence, even for such
restricted graphs (which have treewidth 2), the Sparsest Cut problem is NP-hard
to approximate better than for ; assuming the
Unique Games Conjecture the hardness becomes . For
graphs with large (but constant) treewidth, we show a hardness result of assuming the Unique Games Conjecture.
Our algorithm rounds a linear program based on (a subset of) the
Sherali-Adams lift of the standard Sparsest Cut LP. We show that even for
treewidth-2 graphs, the LP has an integrality gap close to 2 even after
polynomially many rounds of Sherali-Adams. Hence our approach cannot be
improved even on such restricted graphs without using a stronger relaxation
Fixed-parameter tractability of multicut parameterized by the size of the cutset
Given an undirected graph , a collection of
pairs of vertices, and an integer , the Edge Multicut problem ask if there
is a set of at most edges such that the removal of disconnects
every from the corresponding . Vertex Multicut is the analogous
problem where is a set of at most vertices. Our main result is that
both problems can be solved in time , i.e.,
fixed-parameter tractable parameterized by the size of the cutset in the
solution. By contrast, it is unlikely that an algorithm with running time of
the form exists for the directed version of the problem, as
we show it to be W[1]-hard parameterized by the size of the cutset