6 research outputs found
Series-parallel posets and the Tutte polynomial
AbstractWe investigate the Tutte polynomial f(P; t, z) of a series-parallel partially ordered set P. We show that f(P) can be computed in polynomial-time when P is series-parallel and that series-parallel posets having isomorphic deletions and contractions are themselves isomorphic. A formula for f(Pâ) in terms of f(P) is obtained and shows these two polynomials factor over Z[t, z] the same way. We examine several subclasses of the class of series-parallel posets, proving that f(P) â f(Q) for non-isomorphic posets P and Q in the largest of these classes. We also give excluded subposet characterizations of the various subclasses
On the Complexity of Mining Itemsets from the Crowd Using Taxonomies
We study the problem of frequent itemset mining in domains where data is not
recorded in a conventional database but only exists in human knowledge. We
provide examples of such scenarios, and present a crowdsourcing model for them.
The model uses the crowd as an oracle to find out whether an itemset is
frequent or not, and relies on a known taxonomy of the item domain to guide the
search for frequent itemsets. In the spirit of data mining with oracles, we
analyze the complexity of this problem in terms of (i) crowd complexity, that
measures the number of crowd questions required to identify the frequent
itemsets; and (ii) computational complexity, that measures the computational
effort required to choose the questions. We provide lower and upper complexity
bounds in terms of the size and structure of the input taxonomy, as well as the
size of a concise description of the output itemsets. We also provide
constructive algorithms that achieve the upper bounds, and consider more
efficient variants for practical situations.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figures. To be published to ICDT'13. Added missing
acknowledgemen
On the Complexity of Searching in Trees: Average-case Minimization
We focus on the average-case analysis: A function w : V -> Z+ is given which
defines the likelihood for a node to be the one marked, and we want the
strategy that minimizes the expected number of queries. Prior to this paper,
very little was known about this natural question and the complexity of the
problem had remained so far an open question.
We close this question and prove that the above tree search problem is
NP-complete even for the class of trees with diameter at most 4. This results
in a complete characterization of the complexity of the problem with respect to
the diameter size. In fact, for diameter not larger than 3 the problem can be
shown to be polynomially solvable using a dynamic programming approach.
In addition we prove that the problem is NP-complete even for the class of
trees of maximum degree at most 16. To the best of our knowledge, the only
known result in this direction is that the tree search problem is solvable in
O(|V| log|V|) time for trees with degree at most 2 (paths).
We match the above complexity results with a tight algorithmic analysis. We
first show that a natural greedy algorithm attains a 2-approximation.
Furthermore, for the bounded degree instances, we show that any optimal
strategy (i.e., one that minimizes the expected number of queries) performs at
most O(\Delta(T) (log |V| + log w(T))) queries in the worst case, where w(T) is
the sum of the likelihoods of the nodes of T and \Delta(T) is the maximum
degree of T. We combine this result with a non-trivial exponential time
algorithm to provide an FPTAS for trees with bounded degree
Top-k Querying of Unknown Values under Order Constraints
Many practical scenarios make it necessary to evaluate top-k queries over data items with partially unknown values. This paper considers a setting where the values are taken from a numerical domain, and where some partial order constraints are given over known and unknown values: under these constraints, we assume that all possible worlds are equally likely.
Our work is the first to propose a principled scheme to derive the value distributions and expected values of unknown items in this setting, with the goal of computing estimated top-k results by interpolating the unknown values from the known ones. We study the complexity of this general task, and show tight complexity bounds, proving that the problem is intractable, but
can be tractably approximated. We then consider the case of tree-shaped partial orders, where we show a constructive PTIME solution. We also compare our problem setting to other top-k definitions on uncertain data
Searching in trees, series-parallel and interval orders
SIGLECopy held by FIZ Karlsruhe; available from UB/TIB Hannover / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekDEGerman