Parameterized TSP: Beating the Average

In the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP), we are given a complete graph $K_n$ together with an integer weighting $w$ on the edges of $K_n$, and we are asked to find a Hamilton cycle of $K_n$ of minimum weight. Let $h(w)$ denote the average weight of a Hamilton cycle of $K_n$ for the weighting $w$. Vizing (1973) asked whether there is a polynomial-time algorithm which always finds a Hamilton cycle of weight at most $h(w)$. He answered this question in the affirmative and subsequently Rublineckii (1973) and others described several other TSP heuristics satisfying this property. In this paper, we prove a considerable generalisation of Vizing's result: for each fixed $k$, we give an algorithm that decides whether, for any input edge weighting $w$ of $K_n$, there is a Hamilton cycle of $K_n$ of weight at most $h(w)-k$ (and constructs such a cycle if it exists). For $k$ fixed, the running time of the algorithm is polynomial in $n$, where the degree of the polynomial does not depend on $k$ (i.e., the generalised Vizing problem is fixed-parameter tractable with respect to the parameter $k$)

Hamilton cycles in sparse robustly expanding digraphs

The notion of robust expansion has played a central role in the solution of several conjectures involving the packing of Hamilton cycles in graphs and directed graphs. These and other results usually rely on the fact that every robustly expanding (di)graph with suitably large minimum degree contains a Hamilton cycle. Previous proofs of this require Szemer\'edi's Regularity Lemma and so this fact can only be applied to dense, sufficiently large robust expanders. We give a proof that does not use the Regularity Lemma and, indeed, we can apply our result to suitable sparse robustly expanding digraphs.Comment: Accepted for publication in The Electronic Journal of Combinatoric

Deterministic polynomial-time approximation algorithms for partition functions and graph polynomials

In this paper we show a new way of constructing deterministic polynomial-time approximation algorithms for computing complex-valued evaluations of a large class of graph polynomials on bounded degree graphs. In particular, our approach works for the Tutte polynomial and independence polynomial, as well as partition functions of complex-valued spin and edge-coloring models. More specifically, we define a large class of graph polynomials $\mathcal C$ and show that if $p\in \cal C$ and there is a disk $D$ centered at zero in the complex plane such that $p(G)$ does not vanish on $D$ for all bounded degree graphs $G$, then for each $z$ in the interior of $D$ there exists a deterministic polynomial-time approximation algorithm for evaluating $p(G)$ at $z$. This gives an explicit connection between absence of zeros of graph polynomials and the existence of efficient approximation algorithms, allowing us to show new relationships between well-known conjectures. Our work builds on a recent line of work initiated by. Barvinok, which provides a new algorithmic approach besides the existing Markov chain Monte Carlo method and the correlation decay method for these types of problems.Comment: 27 pages; some changes have been made based on referee comments. In particular a tiny error in Proposition 4.4 has been fixed. The introduction and concluding remarks have also been rewritten to incorporate the most recent developments. Accepted for publication in SIAM Journal on Computatio

A domination algorithm for {0,1}\{0,1\}-instances of the travelling salesman problem

We present an approximation algorithm for $\{0,1\}$-instances of the travelling salesman problem which performs well with respect to combinatorial dominance. More precisely, we give a polynomial-time algorithm which has domination ratio $1-n^{-1/29}$. In other words, given a $\{0,1\}$-edge-weighting of the complete graph $K_n$ on $n$ vertices, our algorithm outputs a Hamilton cycle $H^*$ of $K_n$ with the following property: the proportion of Hamilton cycles of $K_n$ whose weight is smaller than that of $H^*$ is at most $n^{-1/29}$. Our analysis is based on a martingale approach. Previously, the best result in this direction was a polynomial-time algorithm with domination ratio $1/2-o(1)$ for arbitrary edge-weights. We also prove a hardness result showing that, if the Exponential Time Hypothesis holds, there exists a constant $C$ such that $n^{-1/29}$ cannot be replaced by $\exp(-(\log n)^C)$ in the result above.Comment: 29 pages (final version to appear in Random Structures and Algorithms

Partitions of combinatorial structures.

In this thesis we explore extremal, structural, and algorithmic problems involving the partitioning of combinatorial structures. We begin by considering problems from the theory of graph cuts. It is well known that every graph has a cut containing at least half its edges. We conjecture that (except for one example), given any two graphs on the same vertex set, we can partition the vertices so that at least half the edges of each graph go across the partition. We give a simple algorithm that comes close to proving this conjecture. We also prove, using probabilistic methods, that the conjecture holds for certain classes of graphs. We consider an analogue of the graph cut problem for posets and determine which graph cut results carry over to posets. We consider both extremal and algorithmic questions, and in particular, we show that the analogous maxcut problem for posets is polynomial-time solvable in contrast to the maxcut problem for graphs, which is NP-complete. Another partitioning problem we consider is that of obtaining a regular partition (in the sense of the Szemeredi Regularity Lemma) for posets, where the partition respects the order of the poset. We prove the existence of such order-preserving, regular partitions for both the comparability graph and the covering graph of a poset, and go on to derive further properties of such partitions. We give a new proof of an old result of Frankl and Furedi, which characterises all 3-uniform hypergraphs for which every set of 4 vertices spans exactly 0 or 2 edges. We use our new proof to derive a corresponding stability result. We also look at questions concerning an analogue of the graph linear extension problem for posets