Classified Stable Matching

We introduce the {\sc classified stable matching} problem, a problem motivated by academic hiring. Suppose that a number of institutes are hiring faculty members from a pool of applicants. Both institutes and applicants have preferences over the other side. An institute classifies the applicants based on their research areas (or any other criterion), and, for each class, it sets a lower bound and an upper bound on the number of applicants it would hire in that class. The objective is to find a stable matching from which no group of participants has reason to deviate. Moreover, the matching should respect the upper/lower bounds of the classes. In the first part of the paper, we study classified stable matching problems whose classifications belong to a fixed set of ``order types.'' We show that if the set consists entirely of downward forests, there is a polynomial-time algorithm; otherwise, it is NP-complete to decide the existence of a stable matching. In the second part, we investigate the problem using a polyhedral approach. Suppose that all classifications are laminar families and there is no lower bound. We propose a set of linear inequalities to describe stable matching polytope and prove that it is integral. This integrality allows us to find various optimal stable matchings using Ellipsoid algorithm. A further ramification of our result is the description of the stable matching polytope for the many-to-many (unclassified) stable matching problem. This answers an open question posed by Sethuraman, Teo and Qian

A Fully Polynomial-Time Approximation Scheme for Speed Scaling with Sleep State

We study classical deadline-based preemptive scheduling of tasks in a computing environment equipped with both dynamic speed scaling and sleep state capabilities: Each task is specified by a release time, a deadline and a processing volume, and has to be scheduled on a single, speed-scalable processor that is supplied with a sleep state. In the sleep state, the processor consumes no energy, but a constant wake-up cost is required to transition back to the active state. In contrast to speed scaling alone, the addition of a sleep state makes it sometimes beneficial to accelerate the processing of tasks in order to transition the processor to the sleep state for longer amounts of time and incur further energy savings. The goal is to output a feasible schedule that minimizes the energy consumption. Since the introduction of the problem by Irani et al. [16], its exact computational complexity has been repeatedly posed as an open question (see e.g. [2,8,15]). The currently best known upper and lower bounds are a 4/3-approximation algorithm and NP-hardness due to [2] and [2,17], respectively. We close the aforementioned gap between the upper and lower bound on the computational complexity of speed scaling with sleep state by presenting a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme for the problem. The scheme is based on a transformation to a non-preemptive variant of the problem, and a discretization that exploits a carefully defined lexicographical ordering among schedules

Graphettes: Constant-time determination of graphlet and orbit identity including (possibly disconnected) graphlets up to size 8.

Graphlets are small connected induced subgraphs of a larger graph G. Graphlets are now commonly used to quantify local and global topology of networks in the field. Methods exist to exhaustively enumerate all graphlets (and their orbits) in large networks as efficiently as possible using orbit counting equations. However, the number of graphlets in G is exponential in both the number of nodes and edges in G. Enumerating them all is already unacceptably expensive on existing large networks, and the problem will only get worse as networks continue to grow in size and density. Here we introduce an efficient method designed to aid statistical sampling of graphlets up to size k = 8 from a large network. We define graphettes as the generalization of graphlets allowing for disconnected graphlets. Given a particular (undirected) graphette g, we introduce the idea of the canonical graphette [Formula: see text] as a representative member of the isomorphism group Iso(g) of g. We compute the mapping [Formula: see text], in the form of a lookup table, from all 2k(k - 1)/2 undirected graphettes g of size k ≤ 8 to their canonical representatives [Formula: see text], as well as the permutation that transforms g to [Formula: see text]. We also compute all automorphism orbits for each canonical graphette. Thus, given any k ≤ 8 nodes in a graph G, we can in constant time infer which graphette it is, as well as which orbit each of the k nodes belongs to. Sampling a large number N of such k-sets of nodes provides an approximation of both the distribution of graphlets and orbits across G, and the orbit degree vector at each node

Does PPP hold for Big Mac price or consumer price index? Evidence from panel cointegration

This paper examines the validity of purchasing power parity (PPP) using CPI and Big Mac prices. The benchmark model, i.e., the OLS method, which does not take nonstationarity into account, rejects the hypothesis of PPP regardless of prices used. We next use the panel cointegration method to consider the nonstationary nature of variables. Estimated results for CPI are mixed. The PPP is rejected when the nominal exchange rate is employed as the dependent variable but is not rejected when the price ratio is used as the dependent variable. By contrast, the PPP is overwhelmingly not rejected when the Big Mac price is used. Last, we remove the production bias and re-examine the same issue by using panel cointegration. The PPP is again decisively rejected when CPI price is used but not for Big Mac price. Accordingly, Big Mac price is more supportive to the validity of PPP than CPI price.Big Mac