42 research outputs found
Discovering Authorities as a function of time in Community Question Answering
Community Question Answering (CQA) websites such as Stack Over
ow provide a great platform
to ask questions and get answers. Such platforms serve the purpose of helping the community of
people who look for answers. The platforms thrive as a result of a small group of people known as
experts who provide quality answers to question posters.
There has been a lot of work to determine experts in CQA websites, make predictions about po-
tential experts and predicting how their answering behaviour varies over time. There may be a
situation where some experts were aggressive contributors to the community at some point in time.
But gradually their contributions started to diminish and they may also finally stop contributing in
future.
We have presented an approach to rank the experts in the community as a function of time. Exper-
tise score of an expert shows how good the expert is. Higher the expertise score, better expert the
person is. Our metrics to calculate the expertise score are modifications of the existing expertise
ranking metrics such that it incorporates durations of inactivity of the expert in the community
while ranking them
A Wowzer Type Lower Bound for the Strong Regularity Lemma
The regularity lemma of Szemeredi asserts that one can partition every graph
into a bounded number of quasi-random bipartite graphs. In some applications
however, one would like to have a strong control on how quasi-random these
bipartite graphs are. Alon, Fischer, Krivelevich and Szegedy obtained a
powerful variant of the regularity lemma, which allows one to have an arbitrary
control on this measure of quasi-randomness. However, their proof only
guaranteed to produce a partition where the number of parts is given by the
Wowzer function, which is the iterated version of the Tower function. We show
here that a bound of this type is unavoidable by constructing a graph H, with
the property that even if one wants a very mild control on the quasi-randomness
of a regular partition, then any such partition of H must have a number of
parts given by a Wowzer-type function
Parameterized Algorithms for Graph Partitioning Problems
In parameterized complexity, a problem instance (I, k) consists of an input I and an
extra parameter k. The parameter k usually a positive integer indicating the size of the
solution or the structure of the input. A computational problem is called fixed-parameter
tractable (FPT) if there is an algorithm for the problem with time complexity O(f(k).nc
),
where f(k) is a function dependent only on the input parameter k, n is the size of the
input and c is a constant. The existence of such an algorithm means that the problem
is tractable for fixed values of the parameter. In this thesis, we provide parameterized
algorithms for the following NP-hard graph partitioning problems:
(i) Matching Cut Problem: In an undirected graph, a matching cut is a partition
of vertices into two non-empty sets such that the edges across the sets induce a matching.
The matching cut problem is the problem of deciding whether a given graph has
a matching cut. The Matching Cut problem is expressible in monadic second-order
logic (MSOL). The MSOL formulation, together with Courcelle’s theorem implies linear
time solvability on graphs with bounded tree-width. However, this approach leads to a
running time of f(||ϕ||, t) · n, where ||ϕ|| is the length of the MSOL formula, t is the
tree-width of the graph and n is the number of vertices of the graph. The dependency of
f(||ϕ||, t) on ||ϕ|| can be as bad as a tower of exponentials.
In this thesis we give a single exponential algorithm for the Matching Cut problem
with tree-width alone as the parameter. The running time of the algorithm is 2O(t)
· n.
This answers an open question posed by Kratsch and Le [Theoretical Computer Science,
2016]. We also show the fixed parameter tractability of the Matching Cut problem
when parameterized by neighborhood diversity or other structural parameters.
(ii) H-Free Coloring Problems: In an undirected graph G for a fixed graph H,
the H-Free q-Coloring problem asks to color the vertices of the graph G using at
most q colors such that none of the color classes contain H as an induced subgraph.
That is every color class is H-free. This is a generalization of the classical q-Coloring
problem, which is to color the vertices of the graph using at most q colors such that no
pair of adjacent vertices are of the same color. The H-Free Chromatic Number is
the minimum number of colors required to H-free color the graph.
For a fixed q, the H-Free q-Coloring problem is expressible in monadic secondorder
logic (MSOL). The MSOL formulation leads to an algorithm with time complexity
f(||ϕ||, t) · n, where ||ϕ|| is the length of the MSOL formula, t is the tree-width of the
graph and n is the number of vertices of the graph.
In this thesis we present the following explicit combinatorial algorithms for H-Free
Coloring problems:
• An O(q
O(t
r
)
· n) time algorithm for the general H-Free q-Coloring problem,
where r = |V (H)|.
• An O(2t+r log t
· n) time algorithm for Kr-Free 2-Coloring problem, where Kr is
a complete graph on r vertices.
The above implies an O(t
O(t
r
)
· n log t) time algorithm to compute the H-Free Chromatic
Number for graphs with tree-width at most t. Therefore H-Free Chromatic
Number is FPT with respect to tree-width.
We also address a variant of H-Free q-Coloring problem which we call H-(Subgraph)Free
q-Coloring problem, which is to color the vertices of the graph such that none of the
color classes contain H as a subgraph (need not be induced).
We present the following algorithms for H-(Subgraph)Free q-Coloring problems.
• An O(q
O(t
r
)
· n) time algorithm for the general H-(Subgraph)Free q-Coloring
problem, which leads to an O(t
O(t
r
)
· n log t) time algorithm to compute the H-
(Subgraph)Free Chromatic Number for graphs with tree-width at most t.
• An O(2O(t
2
)
· n) time algorithm for C4-(Subgraph)Free 2-Coloring, where C4
is a cycle on 4 vertices.
• An O(2O(t
r−2
)
· n) time algorithm for {Kr\e}-(Subgraph)Free 2-Coloring,
where Kr\e is a graph obtained by removing an edge from Kr.
• An O(2O((tr2
)
r−2
)
· n) time algorithm for Cr-(Subgraph)Free 2-Coloring problem,
where Cr is a cycle of length r.
(iii) Happy Coloring Problems: In a vertex-colored graph, an edge is happy if its
endpoints have the same color. Similarly, a vertex is happy if all its incident edges are
happy. we consider the algorithmic aspects of the following Maximum Happy Edges
(k-MHE) problem: given a partially k-colored graph G, find an extended full k-coloring
of G such that the number of happy edges are maximized. When we want to maximize
the number of happy vertices, the problem is known as Maximum Happy Vertices
(k-MHV).
We show that both k-MHE and k-MHV admit polynomial-time algorithms for trees.
We show that k-MHE admits a kernel of size k + `, where ` is the natural parameter,
the number of happy edges. We show the hardness of k-MHE and k-MHV for some
special graphs such as split graphs and bipartite graphs. We show that both k-MHE
and k-MHV are tractable for graphs with bounded tree-width and graphs with bounded
neighborhood diversity.
vii
In the last part of the thesis we present an algorithm for the Replacement Paths
Problem which is defined as follows: Let G (|V (G)| = n and |E(G)| = m) be an undirected
graph with positive edge weights. Let PG(s, t) be a shortest s − t path in G. Let l be the
number of edges in PG(s, t). The Edge Replacement Path problem is to compute a
shortest s − t path in G\{e}, for every edge e in PG(s, t). The Node Replacement
Path problem is to compute a shortest s−t path in G\{v}, for every vertex v in PG(s, t).
We present an O(TSP T (G) + m + l
2
) time and O(m + l
2
) space algorithm for both
the problems, where TSP T (G) is the asymptotic time to compute a single source shortest
path tree in G. The proposed algorithm is simple and easy to implement
Pliable Index Coding via Conflict-Free Colorings of Hypergraphs
In the pliable index coding (PICOD) problem, a server is to serve multiple
clients, each of which possesses a unique subset of the complete message set as
side information and requests a new message which it does not have. The goal of
the server is to do this using as few transmissions as possible. This work
presents a hypergraph coloring approach to the PICOD problem. A
\textit{conflict-free coloring} of a hypergraph is known from literature as an
assignment of colors to its vertices so that each edge of the graph contains
one uniquely colored vertex. For a given PICOD problem represented by a
hypergraph consisting of messages as vertices and request-sets as edges, we
present achievable PICOD schemes using conflict-free colorings of the PICOD
hypergraph. Various graph theoretic parameters arising out of such colorings
(and some new variants) then give a number of upper bounds on the optimal PICOD
length, which we study in this work. Our achievable schemes based on hypergraph
coloring include scalar as well as vector linear PICOD schemes. For the scalar
case, using the correspondence with conflict-free coloring, we show the
existence of an achievable scheme which has length where
refers to a parameter of the hypergraph that captures the maximum
`incidence' number of other edges on any edge. This result improves upon known
achievability results in PICOD literature, in some parameter regimes.Comment: 21 page