A 1.751.75 LP approximation for the Tree Augmentation Problem

In the Tree Augmentation Problem (TAP) the goal is to augment a tree $T$ by a minimum size edge set $F$ from a given edge set $E$ such that $T \cup F$ is $2$-edge-connected. The best approximation ratio known for TAP is $1.5$. In the more general Weighted TAP problem, $F$ should be of minimum weight. Weighted TAP admits several $2$-approximation algorithms w.r.t. to the standard cut LP-relaxation, but for all of them the performance ratio of $2$ is tight even for TAP. The problem is equivalent to the problem of covering a laminar set family. Laminar set families play an important role in the design of approximation algorithms for connectivity network design problems. In fact, Weighted TAP is the simplest connectivity network design problem for which a ratio better than $2$ is not known. Improving this "natural" ratio is a major open problem, which may have implications on many other network design problems. It seems that achieving this goal requires finding an LP-relaxation with integrality gap better than $2$, which is a long time open problem even for TAP. In this paper we introduce such an LP-relaxation and give an algorithm that computes a feasible solution for TAP of size at most $1.75$ times the optimal LP value. This gives some hope to break the ratio $2$ for the weighted case. Our algorithm computes some initial edge set by solving a partial system of constraints that form the integral edge-cover polytope, and then applies local search on $3$-leaf subtrees to exchange some of the edges and to add additional edges. Thus we do not need to solve the LP, and the algorithm runs roughly in time required to find a minimum weight edge-cover in a general graph.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1507.0279

Preprocessing under uncertainty

In this work we study preprocessing for tractable problems when part of the input is unknown or uncertain. This comes up naturally if, e.g., the load of some machines or the congestion of some roads is not known far enough in advance, or if we have to regularly solve a problem over instances that are largely similar, e.g., daily airport scheduling with few charter flights. Unlike robust optimization, which also studies settings like this, our goal lies not in computing solutions that are (approximately) good for every instantiation. Rather, we seek to preprocess the known parts of the input, to speed up finding an optimal solution once the missing data is known. We present efficient algorithms that given an instance with partially uncertain input generate an instance of size polynomial in the amount of uncertain data that is equivalent for every instantiation of the unknown part. Concretely, we obtain such algorithms for Minimum Spanning Tree, Minimum Weight Matroid Basis, and Maximum Cardinality Bipartite Maxing, where respectively the weight of edges, weight of elements, and the availability of vertices is unknown for part of the input. Furthermore, we show that there are tractable problems, such as Small Connected Vertex Cover, for which one cannot hope to obtain similar results.Comment: 18 page

On the Power of Tree-Depth for Fully Polynomial FPT Algorithms

There are many classical problems in P whose time complexities have not been improved over the past decades. Recent studies of "Hardness in P" have revealed that, for several of such problems, the current fastest algorithm is the best possible under some complexity assumptions. To bypass this difficulty, the concept of "FPT inside P" has been introduced. For a problem with the current best time complexity O(n^c), the goal is to design an algorithm running in k^{O(1)}n^{c\u27} time for a parameter k and a constant c\u27<c. In this paper, we investigate the complexity of graph problems in P parameterized by tree-depth, a graph parameter related to tree-width. We show that a simple divide-and-conquer method can solve many graph problems, including Weighted Matching, Negative Cycle Detection, Minimum Weight Cycle, Replacement Paths, and 2-hop Cover, in O(td m) time or O(td (m+nlog n)) time, where td is the tree-depth of the input graph. Because any graph of tree-width tw has tree-depth at most (tw+1)log_2 n, our algorithms also run in O(tw mlog n) time or O(tw (m+nlog n)log n) time. These results match or improve the previous best algorithms parameterized by tree-width. Especially, we solve an open problem of fully polynomial FPT algorithm for Weighted Matching parameterized by tree-width posed by Fomin et al. (SODA 2017)

Approximating Node-Weighted k-MST on Planar Graphs

We study the problem of finding a minimum weight connected subgraph spanning at least $k$ vertices on planar, node-weighted graphs. We give a (4+\eps)-approximation algorithm for this problem. We achieve this by utilizing the recent LMP primal-dual $3$-approximation for the node-weighted prize-collecting Steiner tree problem by Byrka et al (SWAT'16) and adopting an approach by Chudak et al. (Math.\ Prog.\ '04) regarding Lagrangian relaxation for the edge-weighted variant. In particular, we improve the procedure of picking additional vertices (tree merging procedure) given by Sadeghian (2013) by taking a constant number of recursive steps and utilizing the limited guessing procedure of Arora and Karakostas (Math.\ Prog.\ '06). More generally, our approach readily gives a (\nicefrac{4}{3}\cdot r+\eps)-approximation on any graph class where the algorithm of Byrka et al.\ for the prize-collecting version gives an $r$-approximation. We argue that this can be interpreted as a generalization of an analogous result by K\"onemann et al. (Algorithmica~'11) for partial cover problems. Together with a lower bound construction by Mestre (STACS'08) for partial cover this implies that our bound is essentially best possible among algorithms that utilize an LMP algorithm for the Lagrangian relaxation as a black box. In addition to that, we argue by a more involved lower bound construction that even using the LMP algorithm by Byrka et al.\ in a \emph{non-black-box} fashion could not beat the factor \nicefrac{4}{3}\cdot r when the tree merging step relies only on the solutions output by the LMP algorithm