198 research outputs found
Approximating the Held-Karp Bound for Metric TSP in Nearly Linear Time
We give a nearly linear time randomized approximation scheme for the
Held-Karp bound [Held and Karp, 1970] for metric TSP. Formally, given an
undirected edge-weighted graph on edges and , the
algorithm outputs in time, with high probability, a
-approximation to the Held-Karp bound on the metric TSP instance
induced by the shortest path metric on . The algorithm can also be used to
output a corresponding solution to the Subtour Elimination LP. We substantially
improve upon the running time achieved previously
by Garg and Khandekar. The LP solution can be used to obtain a fast randomized
-approximation for metric TSP which improves
upon the running time of previous implementations of Christofides' algorithm
Degree-3 Treewidth Sparsifiers
We study treewidth sparsifiers. Informally, given a graph of treewidth
, a treewidth sparsifier is a minor of , whose treewidth is close to
, is small, and the maximum vertex degree in is bounded.
Treewidth sparsifiers of degree are of particular interest, as routing on
node-disjoint paths, and computing minors seems easier in sub-cubic graphs than
in general graphs.
In this paper we describe an algorithm that, given a graph of treewidth
, computes a topological minor of such that (i) the treewidth of
is ; (ii) ; and (iii) the maximum
vertex degree in is . The running time of the algorithm is polynomial in
and . Our result is in contrast to the known fact that unless , treewidth does not admit polynomial-size kernels.
One of our key technical tools, which is of independent interest, is a
construction of a small minor that preserves node-disjoint routability between
two pairs of vertex subsets. This is closely related to the open question of
computing small good-quality vertex-cut sparsifiers that are also minors of the
original graph.Comment: Extended abstract to appear in Proceedings of ACM-SIAM SODA 201
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