1 research outputs found
DNF Sparsification and a Faster Deterministic Counting Algorithm
Given a DNF formula on n variables, the two natural size measures are the
number of terms or size s(f), and the maximum width of a term w(f). It is
folklore that short DNF formulas can be made narrow. We prove a converse,
showing that narrow formulas can be sparsified. More precisely, any width w DNF
irrespective of its size can be -approximated by a width DNF with
at most terms.
We combine our sparsification result with the work of Luby and Velikovic to
give a faster deterministic algorithm for approximately counting the number of
satisfying solutions to a DNF. Given a formula on n variables with poly(n)
terms, we give a deterministic time algorithm
that computes an additive approximation to the fraction of
satisfying assignments of f for \epsilon = 1/\poly(\log n). The previous best
result due to Luby and Velickovic from nearly two decades ago had a run-time of
.Comment: To appear in the IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity, 201