226 research outputs found
A Linear-Size Logarithmic Stretch Path-Reporting Distance Oracle for General Graphs
In 2001 Thorup and Zwick devised a distance oracle, which given an -vertex
undirected graph and a parameter , has size . Upon a query
their oracle constructs a -approximate path between
and . The query time of the Thorup-Zwick's oracle is , and it was
subsequently improved to by Chechik. A major drawback of the oracle of
Thorup and Zwick is that its space is . Mendel and Naor
devised an oracle with space and stretch , but their
oracle can only report distance estimates and not actual paths. In this paper
we devise a path-reporting distance oracle with size , stretch
and query time , for an arbitrarily small .
In particular, our oracle can provide logarithmic stretch using linear size.
Another variant of our oracle has size , polylogarithmic
stretch, and query time .
For unweighted graphs we devise a distance oracle with multiplicative stretch
, additive stretch , for a function , space
, and query time , for an arbitrarily
small constant . The tradeoff between multiplicative stretch and
size in these oracles is far below girth conjecture threshold (which is stretch
and size ). Breaking the girth conjecture tradeoff is
achieved by exhibiting a tradeoff of different nature between additive stretch
and size . A similar type of tradeoff was exhibited by
a construction of -spanners due to Elkin and Peleg.
However, so far -spanners had no counterpart in the
distance oracles' world.
An important novel tool that we develop on the way to these results is a
{distance-preserving path-reporting oracle}
Approximating Approximate Distance Oracles
Given a finite metric space (V,d), an approximate distance oracle is a data structure which, when queried on two points u,v in V, returns an approximation to the the actual distance between u and v which is within some bounded stretch factor of the true distance. There has been significant work on the tradeoff between the important parameters of approximate distance oracles (and in particular between the size, stretch, and query time), but in this paper we take a different point of view, that of per-instance optimization. If we are given an particular input metric space and stretch bound, can we find the smallest possible approximate distance oracle for that particular input? Since this question is not even well-defined, we restrict our attention to well-known classes of approximate distance oracles, and study whether we can optimize over those classes.
In particular, we give an O(log n)-approximation to the problem of finding the smallest stretch 3 Thorup-Zwick distance oracle, as well as the problem of finding the smallest Pv{a}trac{s}cu-Roditty distance oracle. We also prove a matching Omega(log n) lower bound for both problems, and an Omega(n^{frac{1}{k}-frac{1}{2^{k-1}}}) integrality gap for the more general stretch (2k-1) Thorup-Zwick distance oracle. We also consider the problem of approximating the best TZ or PR approximate distance oracle with outliers, and show that more advanced techniques (SDP relaxations in particular) allow us to optimize even in the presence of outliers
Conditional Lower Bounds for Space/Time Tradeoffs
In recent years much effort has been concentrated towards achieving
polynomial time lower bounds on algorithms for solving various well-known
problems. A useful technique for showing such lower bounds is to prove them
conditionally based on well-studied hardness assumptions such as 3SUM, APSP,
SETH, etc. This line of research helps to obtain a better understanding of the
complexity inside P.
A related question asks to prove conditional space lower bounds on data
structures that are constructed to solve certain algorithmic tasks after an
initial preprocessing stage. This question received little attention in
previous research even though it has potential strong impact.
In this paper we address this question and show that surprisingly many of the
well-studied hard problems that are known to have conditional polynomial time
lower bounds are also hard when concerning space. This hardness is shown as a
tradeoff between the space consumed by the data structure and the time needed
to answer queries. The tradeoff may be either smooth or admit one or more
singularity points.
We reveal interesting connections between different space hardness
conjectures and present matching upper bounds. We also apply these hardness
conjectures to both static and dynamic problems and prove their conditional
space hardness.
We believe that this novel framework of polynomial space conjectures can play
an important role in expressing polynomial space lower bounds of many important
algorithmic problems. Moreover, it seems that it can also help in achieving a
better understanding of the hardness of their corresponding problems in terms
of time
Prioritized Metric Structures and Embedding
Metric data structures (distance oracles, distance labeling schemes, routing
schemes) and low-distortion embeddings provide a powerful algorithmic
methodology, which has been successfully applied for approximation algorithms
\cite{llr}, online algorithms \cite{BBMN11}, distributed algorithms
\cite{KKMPT12} and for computing sparsifiers \cite{ST04}. However, this
methodology appears to have a limitation: the worst-case performance inherently
depends on the cardinality of the metric, and one could not specify in advance
which vertices/points should enjoy a better service (i.e., stretch/distortion,
label size/dimension) than that given by the worst-case guarantee.
In this paper we alleviate this limitation by devising a suit of {\em
prioritized} metric data structures and embeddings. We show that given a
priority ranking of the graph vertices (respectively,
metric points) one can devise a metric data structure (respectively, embedding)
in which the stretch (resp., distortion) incurred by any pair containing a
vertex will depend on the rank of the vertex. We also show that other
important parameters, such as the label size and (in some sense) the dimension,
may depend only on . In some of our metric data structures (resp.,
embeddings) we achieve both prioritized stretch (resp., distortion) and label
size (resp., dimension) {\em simultaneously}. The worst-case performance of our
metric data structures and embeddings is typically asymptotically no worse than
of their non-prioritized counterparts.Comment: To appear at STOC 201
Constructing Light Spanners Deterministically in Near-Linear Time
Graph spanners are well-studied and widely used both in theory and practice. In a recent breakthrough, Chechik and Wulff-Nilsen [Shiri Chechik and Christian Wulff-Nilsen, 2018] improved the state-of-the-art for light spanners by constructing a (2k-1)(1+epsilon)-spanner with O(n^(1+1/k)) edges and O_epsilon(n^(1/k)) lightness. Soon after, Filtser and Solomon [Arnold Filtser and Shay Solomon, 2016] showed that the classic greedy spanner construction achieves the same bounds. The major drawback of the greedy spanner is its running time of O(mn^(1+1/k)) (which is faster than [Shiri Chechik and Christian Wulff-Nilsen, 2018]). This makes the construction impractical even for graphs of moderate size. Much faster spanner constructions do exist but they only achieve lightness Omega_epsilon(kn^(1/k)), even when randomization is used.
The contribution of this paper is deterministic spanner constructions that are fast, and achieve similar bounds as the state-of-the-art slower constructions. Our first result is an O_epsilon(n^(2+1/k+epsilon\u27)) time spanner construction which achieves the state-of-the-art bounds. Our second result is an O_epsilon(m + n log n) time construction of a spanner with (2k-1)(1+epsilon) stretch, O(log k * n^(1+1/k) edges and O_epsilon(log k * n^(1/k)) lightness. This is an exponential improvement in the dependence on k compared to the previous result with such running time. Finally, for the important special case where k=log n, for every constant epsilon>0, we provide an O(m+n^(1+epsilon)) time construction that produces an O(log n)-spanner with O(n) edges and O(1) lightness which is asymptotically optimal. This is the first known sub-quadratic construction of such a spanner for any k = omega(1).
To achieve our constructions, we show a novel deterministic incremental approximate distance oracle. Our new oracle is crucial in our construction, as known randomized dynamic oracles require the assumption of a non-adaptive adversary. This is a strong assumption, which has seen recent attention in prolific venues. Our new oracle allows the order of the edge insertions to not be fixed in advance, which is critical as our spanner algorithm chooses which edges to insert based on the answers to distance queries. We believe our new oracle is of independent interest
Distance Oracles for Time-Dependent Networks
We present the first approximate distance oracle for sparse directed networks
with time-dependent arc-travel-times determined by continuous, piecewise
linear, positive functions possessing the FIFO property.
Our approach precomputes approximate distance summaries from
selected landmark vertices to all other vertices in the network. Our oracle
uses subquadratic space and time preprocessing, and provides two sublinear-time
query algorithms that deliver constant and approximate
shortest-travel-times, respectively, for arbitrary origin-destination pairs in
the network, for any constant . Our oracle is based only on
the sparsity of the network, along with two quite natural assumptions about
travel-time functions which allow the smooth transition towards asymmetric and
time-dependent distance metrics.Comment: A preliminary version appeared as Technical Report ECOMPASS-TR-025 of
EU funded research project eCOMPASS (http://www.ecompass-project.eu/). An
extended abstract also appeared in the 41st International Colloquium on
Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2014, track-A
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