388 research outputs found
Unsplittable coverings in the plane
A system of sets forms an {\em -fold covering} of a set if every point
of belongs to at least of its members. A -fold covering is called a
{\em covering}. The problem of splitting multiple coverings into several
coverings was motivated by classical density estimates for {\em sphere
packings} as well as by the {\em planar sensor cover problem}. It has been the
prevailing conjecture for 35 years (settled in many special cases) that for
every plane convex body , there exists a constant such that every
-fold covering of the plane with translates of splits into
coverings. In the present paper, it is proved that this conjecture is false for
the unit disk. The proof can be generalized to construct, for every , an
unsplittable -fold covering of the plane with translates of any open convex
body which has a smooth boundary with everywhere {\em positive curvature}.
Somewhat surprisingly, {\em unbounded} open convex sets do not misbehave,
they satisfy the conjecture: every -fold covering of any region of the plane
by translates of such a set splits into two coverings. To establish this
result, we prove a general coloring theorem for hypergraphs of a special type:
{\em shift-chains}. We also show that there is a constant such that, for
any positive integer , every -fold covering of a region with unit disks
splits into two coverings, provided that every point is covered by {\em at
most} sets
An Incidence Geometry approach to Dictionary Learning
We study the Dictionary Learning (aka Sparse Coding) problem of obtaining a
sparse representation of data points, by learning \emph{dictionary vectors}
upon which the data points can be written as sparse linear combinations. We
view this problem from a geometry perspective as the spanning set of a subspace
arrangement, and focus on understanding the case when the underlying hypergraph
of the subspace arrangement is specified. For this Fitted Dictionary Learning
problem, we completely characterize the combinatorics of the associated
subspace arrangements (i.e.\ their underlying hypergraphs). Specifically, a
combinatorial rigidity-type theorem is proven for a type of geometric incidence
system. The theorem characterizes the hypergraphs of subspace arrangements that
generically yield (a) at least one dictionary (b) a locally unique dictionary
(i.e.\ at most a finite number of isolated dictionaries) of the specified size.
We are unaware of prior application of combinatorial rigidity techniques in the
setting of Dictionary Learning, or even in machine learning. We also provide a
systematic classification of problems related to Dictionary Learning together
with various algorithms, their assumptions and performance
A version of Tutte's polynomial for hypergraphs
Tutte's dichromate T(x,y) is a well known graph invariant. Using the original
definition in terms of internal and external activities as our point of
departure, we generalize the valuations T(x,1) and T(1,y) to hypergraphs. In
the definition, we associate activities to hypertrees, which are
generalizations of the indicator function of the edge set of a spanning tree.
We prove that hypertrees form a lattice polytope which is the set of bases in a
polymatroid. In fact, we extend our invariants to integer polymatroids as well.
We also examine hypergraphs that can be represented by planar bipartite graphs,
write their hypertree polytopes in the form of a determinant, and prove a
duality property that leads to an extension of Tutte's Tree Trinity Theorem.Comment: 49 page
Algorithms to Approximate Column-Sparse Packing Problems
Column-sparse packing problems arise in several contexts in both
deterministic and stochastic discrete optimization. We present two unifying
ideas, (non-uniform) attenuation and multiple-chance algorithms, to obtain
improved approximation algorithms for some well-known families of such
problems. As three main examples, we attain the integrality gap, up to
lower-order terms, for known LP relaxations for k-column sparse packing integer
programs (Bansal et al., Theory of Computing, 2012) and stochastic k-set
packing (Bansal et al., Algorithmica, 2012), and go "half the remaining
distance" to optimal for a major integrality-gap conjecture of Furedi, Kahn and
Seymour on hypergraph matching (Combinatorica, 1993).Comment: Extended abstract appeared in SODA 2018. Full version in ACM
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