30,143 research outputs found
Fast Computation of Small Cuts via Cycle Space Sampling
We describe a new sampling-based method to determine cuts in an undirected
graph. For a graph (V, E), its cycle space is the family of all subsets of E
that have even degree at each vertex. We prove that with high probability,
sampling the cycle space identifies the cuts of a graph. This leads to simple
new linear-time sequential algorithms for finding all cut edges and cut pairs
(a set of 2 edges that form a cut) of a graph.
In the model of distributed computing in a graph G=(V, E) with O(log V)-bit
messages, our approach yields faster algorithms for several problems. The
diameter of G is denoted by Diam, and the maximum degree by Delta. We obtain
simple O(Diam)-time distributed algorithms to find all cut edges,
2-edge-connected components, and cut pairs, matching or improving upon previous
time bounds. Under natural conditions these new algorithms are universally
optimal --- i.e. a Omega(Diam)-time lower bound holds on every graph. We obtain
a O(Diam+Delta/log V)-time distributed algorithm for finding cut vertices; this
is faster than the best previous algorithm when Delta, Diam = O(sqrt(V)). A
simple extension of our work yields the first distributed algorithm with
sub-linear time for 3-edge-connected components. The basic distributed
algorithms are Monte Carlo, but they can be made Las Vegas without increasing
the asymptotic complexity.
In the model of parallel computing on the EREW PRAM our approach yields a
simple algorithm with optimal time complexity O(log V) for finding cut pairs
and 3-edge-connected components.Comment: Previous version appeared in Proc. 35th ICALP, pages 145--160, 200
Computing a Nonnegative Matrix Factorization -- Provably
In the Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) problem we are given an nonnegative matrix and an integer . Our goal is to express
as where and are nonnegative matrices of size
and respectively. In some applications, it makes sense to ask
instead for the product to approximate -- i.e. (approximately)
minimize \norm{M - AW}_F where \norm{}_F denotes the Frobenius norm; we
refer to this as Approximate NMF. This problem has a rich history spanning
quantum mechanics, probability theory, data analysis, polyhedral combinatorics,
communication complexity, demography, chemometrics, etc. In the past decade NMF
has become enormously popular in machine learning, where and are
computed using a variety of local search heuristics. Vavasis proved that this
problem is NP-complete. We initiate a study of when this problem is solvable in
polynomial time:
1. We give a polynomial-time algorithm for exact and approximate NMF for
every constant . Indeed NMF is most interesting in applications precisely
when is small.
2. We complement this with a hardness result, that if exact NMF can be solved
in time , 3-SAT has a sub-exponential time algorithm. This rules
out substantial improvements to the above algorithm.
3. We give an algorithm that runs in time polynomial in , and
under the separablity condition identified by Donoho and Stodden in 2003. The
algorithm may be practical since it is simple and noise tolerant (under benign
assumptions). Separability is believed to hold in many practical settings.
To the best of our knowledge, this last result is the first example of a
polynomial-time algorithm that provably works under a non-trivial condition on
the input and we believe that this will be an interesting and important
direction for future work.Comment: 29 pages, 3 figure
Simulating Quantum Correlations with Finite Communication
Assume Alice and Bob share some bipartite -dimensional quantum state. A
well-known result in quantum mechanics says that by performing two-outcome
measurements, Alice and Bob can produce correlations that cannot be obtained
locally, i.e., with shared randomness alone. We show that by using only two
bits of communication, Alice and Bob can classically simulate any such
correlations. All previous protocols for exact simulation required the
communication to grow to infinity with the dimension . Our protocol and
analysis are based on a power series method, resembling Krivine's bound on
Grothendieck's constant, and on the computation of volumes of spherical
tetrahedra.Comment: 19 pages, 3 figures, preliminary version in IEEE FOCS 2007; to appear
in SICOM
An Optimal Lower Bound on the Communication Complexity of Gap-Hamming-Distance
We prove an optimal lower bound on the randomized communication
complexity of the much-studied Gap-Hamming-Distance problem. As a consequence,
we obtain essentially optimal multi-pass space lower bounds in the data stream
model for a number of fundamental problems, including the estimation of
frequency moments.
The Gap-Hamming-Distance problem is a communication problem, wherein Alice
and Bob receive -bit strings and , respectively. They are promised
that the Hamming distance between and is either at least
or at most , and their goal is to decide which of these is the
case. Since the formal presentation of the problem by Indyk and Woodruff (FOCS,
2003), it had been conjectured that the naive protocol, which uses bits of
communication, is asymptotically optimal. The conjecture was shown to be true
in several special cases, e.g., when the communication is deterministic, or
when the number of rounds of communication is limited.
The proof of our aforementioned result, which settles this conjecture fully,
is based on a new geometric statement regarding correlations in Gaussian space,
related to a result of C. Borell (1985). To prove this geometric statement, we
show that random projections of not-too-small sets in Gaussian space are close
to a mixture of translated normal variables
The projector algorithm: a simple parallel algorithm for computing Voronoi diagrams and Delaunay graphs
The Voronoi diagram is a certain geometric data structure which has numerous
applications in various scientific and technological fields. The theory of
algorithms for computing 2D Euclidean Voronoi diagrams of point sites is rich
and useful, with several different and important algorithms. However, this
theory has been quite steady during the last few decades in the sense that no
essentially new algorithms have entered the game. In addition, most of the
known algorithms are serial in nature and hence cast inherent difficulties on
the possibility to compute the diagram in parallel. In this paper we present
the projector algorithm: a new and simple algorithm which enables the
(combinatorial) computation of 2D Voronoi diagrams. The algorithm is
significantly different from previous ones and some of the involved concepts in
it are in the spirit of linear programming and optics. Parallel implementation
is naturally supported since each Voronoi cell can be computed independently of
the other cells. A new combinatorial structure for representing the cells (and
any convex polytope) is described along the way and the computation of the
induced Delaunay graph is obtained almost automatically.Comment: This is a major revision; re-organization and better presentation of
some parts; correction of several inaccuracies; improvement of some proofs
and figures; added references; modification of the title; the paper is long
but more than half of it is composed of proofs and references: it is
sufficient to look at pages 5, 7--11 in order to understand the algorith
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