45 research outputs found
Approximation Schemes for Maximum Weight Independent Set of Rectangles
In the Maximum Weight Independent Set of Rectangles (MWISR) problem we are
given a set of n axis-parallel rectangles in the 2D-plane, and the goal is to
select a maximum weight subset of pairwise non-overlapping rectangles. Due to
many applications, e.g. in data mining, map labeling and admission control, the
problem has received a lot of attention by various research communities. We
present the first (1+epsilon)-approximation algorithm for the MWISR problem
with quasi-polynomial running time 2^{poly(log n/epsilon)}. In contrast, the
best known polynomial time approximation algorithms for the problem achieve
superconstant approximation ratios of O(log log n) (unweighted case) and O(log
n / log log n) (weighted case).
Key to our results is a new geometric dynamic program which recursively
subdivides the plane into polygons of bounded complexity. We provide the
technical tools that are needed to analyze its performance. In particular, we
present a method of partitioning the plane into small and simple areas such
that the rectangles of an optimal solution are intersected in a very controlled
manner. Together with a novel application of the weighted planar graph
separator theorem due to Arora et al. this allows us to upper bound our
approximation ratio by (1+epsilon).
Our dynamic program is very general and we believe that it will be useful for
other settings. In particular, we show that, when parametrized properly, it
provides a polynomial time (1+epsilon)-approximation for the special case of
the MWISR problem when each rectangle is relatively large in at least one
dimension. Key to this analysis is a method to tile the plane in order to
approximately describe the topology of these rectangles in an optimal solution.
This technique might be a useful insight to design better polynomial time
approximation algorithms or even a PTAS for the MWISR problem
Large-girth roots of graphs
We study the problem of recognizing graph powers and computing roots of
graphs. We provide a polynomial time recognition algorithm for r-th powers of
graphs of girth at least 2r+3, thus improving a bound conjectured by Farzad et
al. (STACS 2009). Our algorithm also finds all r-th roots of a given graph that
have girth at least 2r+3 and no degree one vertices, which is a step towards a
recent conjecture of Levenshtein that such root should be unique. On the
negative side, we prove that recognition becomes an NP-complete problem when
the bound on girth is about twice smaller. Similar results have so far only
been attempted for r=2,3.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figure
A QPTAS for Maximum Weight Independent Set of Polygons with Polylogarithmically Many Vertices
The Maximum Weight Independent Set of Polygons problem is a fundamental
problem in computational geometry. Given a set of weighted polygons in the
2-dimensional plane, the goal is to find a set of pairwise non-overlapping
polygons with maximum total weight. Due to its wide range of applications, the
MWISP problem and its special cases have been extensively studied both in the
approximation algorithms and the computational geometry community. Despite a
lot of research, its general case is not well-understood. Currently the best
known polynomial time algorithm achieves an approximation ratio of n^(epsilon)
[Fox and Pach, SODA 2011], and it is not even clear whether the problem is
APX-hard. We present a (1+epsilon)-approximation algorithm, assuming that each
polygon in the input has at most a polylogarithmic number of vertices. Our
algorithm has quasi-polynomial running time.
We use a recently introduced framework for approximating maximum weight
independent set in geometric intersection graphs. The framework has been used
to construct a QPTAS in the much simpler case of axis-parallel rectangles. We
extend it in two ways, to adapt it to our much more general setting. First, we
show that its technical core can be reduced to the case when all input polygons
are triangles. Secondly, we replace its key technical ingredient which is a
method to partition the plane using only few edges such that the objects
stemming from the optimal solution are evenly distributed among the resulting
faces and each object is intersected only a few times. Our new procedure for
this task is not more complex than the original one, and it can handle the
arising difficulties due to the arbitrary angles of the polygons. Note that
already this obstacle makes the known analysis for the above framework fail.
Also, in general it is not well understood how to handle this difficulty by
efficient approximation algorithms
Approximating Airports and Railways
In this paper we consider the airport and railway problem (AR), which combines capacitated facility location with network design, both in the general metric and the two-dimensional Euclidean space. An instance of the airport and railway problem consists of a set of points in the corresponding metric, together with a non-negative weight for each point, and a parameter k. The points represent cities, the weights denote costs of opening an airport in the corresponding city, and the parameter k is a maximum capacity of an airport. The goal is to construct a minimum cost network of airports and railways connecting all the cities, where railways correspond to edges connecting pairs of points, and the cost of a railway is equal to the distance between the corresponding points. The network is partitioned into components, where each component contains an open airport, and spans at most k cities. For the Euclidean case, any points in the plane can be used as Steiner vertices of the network. We obtain the first bicriteria approximation algorithm for AR for the general metric case, which yields a 4-approximate solution with a resource augmentation of the airport capacity k by a factor of 2. More generally, for any parameter 0 < p <= 1 where pk is an integer we develop a (4/3)(2 + 1/p)-approximation algorithm for metric AR with a resource augmentation by a factor of 1 + p.
Furthermore, we obtain the first constant factor approximation algorithm that does not resort to resource augmentation for AR in the Euclidean plane. Additionally, for the Euclidean setting we provide a quasi-polynomial time approximation scheme for the same problem with a resource augmentation by a factor of 1 + mu on the airport capacity, for any fixed mu > 0
New Approximation Algorithms for (1,2)-TSP
We give faster and simpler approximation algorithms for the (1,2)-TSP problem, a well-studied variant of the traveling salesperson problem where all distances between cities are either 1 or 2.
Our main results are two approximation algorithms for (1,2)-TSP, one with approximation factor 8/7 and run time O(n^3) and the other having an approximation guarantee of 7/6 and run time O(n^{2.5}). The 8/7-approximation matches the best known approximation factor for (1,2)-TSP, due to Berman and Karpinski (SODA 2006), but considerably improves the previous best run time of O(n^9). Thus, ours is the first improvement for the (1,2)-TSP problem in more than 10 years. The algorithm is based on combining three copies of a minimum-cost cycle cover of the input graph together with a relaxed version of a minimum weight matching, which allows using "half-edges". The resulting multigraph is then edge-colored with four colors so that each color class yields a collection of vertex-disjoint paths. The paths from one color class can then be extended to an 8/7-approximate traveling salesperson tour. Our algorithm, and in particular its analysis, is simpler than the previously best 8/7-approximation.
The 7/6-approximation algorithm is similar and even simpler, and has the advantage of not using Hartvigsen\u27s complicated algorithm for computing a minimum-cost triangle-free cycle cover
An O(log k)-competitive algorithm for generalized caching
In the generalized caching problem, we have a set of pages and a cache of size k. Each page p has a size wpe1 and fetching cost cp for loading the page into the cache. At any point in time, the sum of the sizes of the pages stored in the cache cannot exceed k. The input consists of a sequence of page requests. If a page is not present in the cache at the time it is requested, it has to be loaded into the cache incurring a cost of cp. We give a randomized O(log k)-competitive online algorithm for the generalized caching problem, improving the previous bound of O(log2 k) by Bansal, Buchbinder, and Naor (STOC'08). This improved bound is tight and of the same order as the known bounds for the classic problem with uniform weights and sizes. We use the same LP based techniques as Bansal et al. but provide improved and slightly simplified methods for rounding fractional solutions online