140 research outputs found
Topics in Graph Algorithms: Structural Results and Algorithmic Techniques, with Applications
Coping with computational intractability has inspired the development of a variety of algorithmic techniques. The main challenge has usually been the design of polynomial time algorithms for NP-complete problems in a way that guarantees some, often worst-case, satisfactory performance when compared to exact (optimal) solutions. We mainly study some emergent techniques that help to bridge the gap between computational intractability and practicality. We present results that lead to better exact and approximation algorithms and better implementations. The problems considered in this dissertation share much in common structurally, and have applications in several scientific domains, including circuit design, network reliability, and bioinformatics. We begin by considering the relationship between graph coloring and the immersion order, a well-quasi-order defined on the set of finite graphs. We establish several (structural) results and discuss their potential algorithmic consequences. We discuss graph metrics such as treewidth and pathwidth. Treewidth is well studied, mainly because many problems that are NP-hard in general have polynomial time algorithms when restricted to graphs of bounded treewidth. Pathwidth has many applications ranging from circuit layout to natural language processing. We present a linear time algorithm to approximate the pathwidth of planar graphs that have a fixed disk dimension. We consider the face cover problem, which has potential applications in facilities location and logistics. Being fixed-parameter tractable, we develop an algorithm that solves it in time O(5k + n2) where k is the input parameter. This is a notable improvement over the previous best known algorithm, which runs in O(8kn). In addition to the structural and algorithmic results, this text tries to illustrate the practicality of fixed-parameter algorithms. This is achieved by implementing some algorithms for the vertex cover problem, and conducting experiments on real data sets. Our experiments advocate the viewpoint that, for many practical purposes, exact solutions of some NP-complete problems are affordable
Adaptive Computation of the Swap-Insert Correction Distance
The Swap-Insert Correction distance from a string of length to
another string of length on the alphabet is the minimum
number of insertions, and swaps of pairs of adjacent symbols, converting
into . Contrarily to other correction distances, computing it is NP-Hard in
the size of the alphabet. We describe an algorithm computing this distance
in time within , where there are occurrences of
in , occurrences of in , and where
measures the
difficulty of the instance. The difficulty is bounded by above by various
terms, such as the length of the shortest string , and by the maximum number
of occurrences of a single character in . Those results illustrate how, in
many cases, the correction distance between two strings can be easier to
compute than in the worst case scenario.Comment: 16 pages, no figures, long version of the extended abstract accepted
to SPIRE 201
Data Reductions and Combinatorial Bounds for Improved Approximation Algorithms
Kernelization algorithms in the context of Parameterized Complexity are often
based on a combination of reduction rules and combinatorial insights. We will
expose in this paper a similar strategy for obtaining polynomial-time
approximation algorithms. Our method features the use of
approximation-preserving reductions, akin to the notion of parameterized
reductions. We exemplify this method to obtain the currently best approximation
algorithms for \textsc{Harmless Set}, \textsc{Differential} and
\textsc{Multiple Nonblocker}, all of them can be considered in the context of
securing networks or information propagation
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