812 research outputs found
Products of Foldable Triangulations
Regular triangulations of products of lattice polytopes are constructed with
the additional property that the dual graphs of the triangulations are
bipartite. The (weighted) size difference of this bipartition is a lower bound
for the number of real roots of certain sparse polynomial systems by recent
results of Soprunova and Sottile [Adv. Math. 204(1):116-151, 2006]. Special
attention is paid to the cube case.Comment: new title; several paragraphs reformulated; 23 page
Acyclic orientations with path constraints
Many well-known combinatorial optimization problems can be stated over the
set of acyclic orientations of an undirected graph. For example, acyclic
orientations with certain diameter constraints are closely related to the
optimal solutions of the vertex coloring and frequency assignment problems. In
this paper we introduce a linear programming formulation of acyclic
orientations with path constraints, and discuss its use in the solution of the
vertex coloring problem and some versions of the frequency assignment problem.
A study of the polytope associated with the formulation is presented, including
proofs of which constraints of the formulation are facet-defining and the
introduction of new classes of valid inequalities
Average Sensitivity of Graph Algorithms
In modern applications of graphs algorithms, where the graphs of interest are
large and dynamic, it is unrealistic to assume that an input representation
contains the full information of a graph being studied. Hence, it is desirable
to use algorithms that, even when only a (large) subgraph is available, output
solutions that are close to the solutions output when the whole graph is
available. We formalize this idea by introducing the notion of average
sensitivity of graph algorithms, which is the average earth mover's distance
between the output distributions of an algorithm on a graph and its subgraph
obtained by removing an edge, where the average is over the edges removed and
the distance between two outputs is the Hamming distance.
In this work, we initiate a systematic study of average sensitivity. After
deriving basic properties of average sensitivity such as composition, we
provide efficient approximation algorithms with low average sensitivities for
concrete graph problems, including the minimum spanning forest problem, the
global minimum cut problem, the minimum - cut problem, and the maximum
matching problem. In addition, we prove that the average sensitivity of our
global minimum cut algorithm is almost optimal, by showing a nearly matching
lower bound. We also show that every algorithm for the 2-coloring problem has
average sensitivity linear in the number of vertices. One of the main ideas
involved in designing our algorithms with low average sensitivity is the
following fact; if the presence of a vertex or an edge in the solution output
by an algorithm can be decided locally, then the algorithm has a low average
sensitivity, allowing us to reuse the analyses of known sublinear-time
algorithms and local computation algorithms (LCAs). Using this connection, we
show that every LCA for 2-coloring has linear query complexity, thereby
answering an open question.Comment: 39 pages, 1 figur
Changing Bases: Multistage Optimization for Matroids and Matchings
This paper is motivated by the fact that many systems need to be maintained
continually while the underlying costs change over time. The challenge is to
continually maintain near-optimal solutions to the underlying optimization
problems, without creating too much churn in the solution itself. We model this
as a multistage combinatorial optimization problem where the input is a
sequence of cost functions (one for each time step); while we can change the
solution from step to step, we incur an additional cost for every such change.
We study the multistage matroid maintenance problem, where we need to maintain
a base of a matroid in each time step under the changing cost functions and
acquisition costs for adding new elements. The online version of this problem
generalizes online paging. E.g., given a graph, we need to maintain a spanning
tree at each step: we pay for the cost of the tree at time
, and also for the number of edges changed at
this step. Our main result is an -approximation, where is
the number of elements/edges and is the rank of the matroid. We also give
an approximation for the offline version of the problem. These
bounds hold when the acquisition costs are non-uniform, in which caseboth these
results are the best possible unless P=NP.
We also study the perfect matching version of the problem, where we must
maintain a perfect matching at each step under changing cost functions and
costs for adding new elements. Surprisingly, the hardness drastically
increases: for any constant , there is no
-approximation to the multistage matching maintenance
problem, even in the offline case
On the density of sets avoiding parallelohedron distance 1
The maximal density of a measurable subset of R^n avoiding Euclidean
distance1 is unknown except in the trivial case of dimension 1. In this paper,
we consider thecase of a distance associated to a polytope that tiles space,
where it is likely that the setsavoiding distance 1 are of maximal density
2^-n, as conjectured by Bachoc and Robins. We prove that this is true for n =
2, and for the Vorono\"i regions of the lattices An, n >= 2
- …