Towards a Theory of Parameterized Streaming Algorithms

Parameterized complexity attempts to give a more fine-grained analysis of the complexity of problems: instead of measuring the running time as a function of only the input size, we analyze the running time with respect to additional parameters. This approach has proven to be highly successful in delineating our understanding of NP-hard problems. Given this success with the TIME resource, it seems but natural to use this approach for dealing with the SPACE resource. First attempts in this direction have considered a few individual problems, with some success: Fafianie and Kratsch [MFCS\u2714] and Chitnis et al. [SODA\u2715] introduced the notions of streaming kernels and parameterized streaming algorithms respectively. For example, the latter shows how to refine the Omega(n^2) bit lower bound for finding a minimum Vertex Cover (VC) in the streaming setting by designing an algorithm for the parameterized k-VC problem which uses O(k^{2}log n) bits. In this paper, we initiate a systematic study of graph problems from the paradigm of parameterized streaming algorithms. We first define a natural hierarchy of space complexity classes of FPS, SubPS, SemiPS, SupPS and BrutePS, and then obtain tight classifications for several well-studied graph problems such as Longest Path, Feedback Vertex Set, Dominating Set, Girth, Treewidth, etc. into this hierarchy (see Figure 1 and Table 1). On the algorithmic side, our parameterized streaming algorithms use techniques from the FPT world such as bidimensionality, iterative compression and bounded-depth search trees. On the hardness side, we obtain lower bounds for the parameterized streaming complexity of various problems via novel reductions from problems in communication complexity. We also show a general (unconditional) lower bound for space complexity of parameterized streaming algorithms for a large class of problems inspired by the recently developed frameworks for showing (conditional) kernelization lower bounds. Parameterized algorithms and streaming algorithms are approaches to cope with TIME and SPACE intractability respectively. It is our hope that this work on parameterized streaming algorithms leads to two-way flow of ideas between these two previously separated areas of theoretical computer science

Taming Big Data By Streaming

Data streams have emerged as a natural computational model for numerous applications of big data processing. In this model, algorithms are assumed to have access to a limited amount of memory and can only make a single pass (or a few passes) over the data, but need to produce sufficiently accurate answers for some objective functions on the dataset. This model captures various real-world applications and stimulates new scalable tools for solving important problems in the big data era. This dissertation focuses on the following two aspects of the streaming model. 1. Understanding the capability of the streaming model. For a vector aggregation stream, i.e., when the stream is a sequence of updates to an underlying $n$-dimensional vector $v$ (for very large $n$), we establish nearly tight space bounds on streaming algorithms of approximating functions of the form $\sum_{i=1}^n g(v_i)$ for nearly all functions $g$ of one-variable and $l(v)$ for all symmetric norms $l$. These results provide a deeper understanding of the streaming computation model. 2. Tighter upper bounds. We provide better streaming $k$-median clustering algorithms in a dynamic points stream, i.e., a stream of insertion and deletion of points on a discrete Euclidean space ($[\Delta]^d$ for sufficiently large $\Delta$ and $d$). Our algorithms use k\cdot\poly(d \log \Delta) space/update time and maintain with high probability an approximate $k$-median solution to the streaming dataset. All previous algorithms for computing an approximation for the $k$-median problem over dynamic data streams required space and update time exponential in $d$