Block Crossings in Storyline Visualizations

Storyline visualizations help visualize encounters of the characters in a story over time. Each character is represented by an x-monotone curve that goes from left to right. A meeting is represented by having the characters that participate in the meeting run close together for some time. In order to keep the visual complexity low, rather than just minimizing pairwise crossings of curves, we propose to count block crossings, that is, pairs of intersecting bundles of lines. Our main results are as follows. We show that minimizing the number of block crossings is NP-hard, and we develop, for meetings of bounded size, a constant-factor approximation. We also present two fixed-parameter algorithms and, for meetings of size 2, a greedy heuristic that we evaluate experimentally.Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 24th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2016

Brief Announcement: Approximation Schemes for Geometric Coverage Problems

In this announcement, we show that the classical Maximum Coverage problem (MC) admits a PTAS via local search in essentially all cases where the corresponding instances of Set Cover (SC) admit a PTAS via the local search approach by Mustafa and Ray [Nabil H. Mustafa and Saurabh Ray, 2010]. As a corollary, we answer an open question by Badanidiyuru, Kleinberg, and Lee [Ashwinkumar Badanidiyuru et al., 2012] regarding half-spaces in R^3 thereby settling the existence of PTASs for essentially all natural cases of geometric MC problems. As an intermediate result, we show a color-balanced version of the classical planar subdivision theorem by Frederickson [Greg N. Frederickson, 1987]. We believe that some of our ideas may be useful for analyzing local search in other settings involving a hard cardinality constraint

The Complexity of Finding Tangles

We study the following combinatorial problem. Given a set of $n$ y-monotone curves, which we call wires, a tangle determines the order of the wires on a number of horizontal layers such that the orders of the wires on any two consecutive layers differ only in swaps of neighboring wires. Given a multiset $L$ of swaps (that is, unordered pairs of wires) and an initial order of the wires, a tangle realizes $L$ if each pair of wires changes its order exactly as many times as specified by $L$. Finding a tangle that realizes a given multiset of swaps and uses the least number of layers is known to be NP-hard. We show that it is even NP-hard to decide if a realizing tangle exists

Bundled Crossings Revisited

International audienceAn effective way to reduce clutter in a graph drawing that has (many) crossings is to group edges that travel in parallel into bundles. Each edge can participate in many such bundles. Any crossing in this bundled graph occurs between two bundles, i.e., as a bundled crossing. We consider the problem of bundled crossing minimization: A graph is given and the goal is to find a bundled drawing with at most k bundled crossings. We show that the problem is NP-hard when we require a simple drawing. Our main result is an FPT algorithm (in k) for simple circular layouts where vertices must be placed on a circle and edges must be drawn inside the circle. These results make use of the connection between bundled crossings and graph genus. We also consider bundling crossings in a given drawing, in particular for storyline visualizations

Approximation schemes for geometric coverage problems

In their seminal work, Mustafa and Ray [30] showed that a wide class of geometric set cover (SC) problems admit a PTAS via local search - this is one of the most general approaches known for such problems. Their result applies if a naturally defined "exchange graph" for two feasible solutions is planar and is based on subdividing this graph via a planar separator theorem due to Frederickson [17]. Obtaining similar results for the related maximum coverage problem (MC) seems non-trivial due to the hard cardinality constraint. In fact, while Badanidiyuru, Kleinberg, and Lee [4] have shown (via a different analysis) that local search yields a PTAS for two-dimensional real halfspaces, they only conjectured that the same holds true for dimension three. Interestingly, at this point it was already known that local search provides a PTAS for the corresponding set cover case and this followed directly from the approach of Mustafa and Ray. In this work we provide a way to address the above-mentioned issue. First, we propose a color-balanced version of the planar separator theorem. The resulting subdivision approximates locally in each part the global distribution of the colors. Second, we show how this roughly balanced subdivision can be employed in a more careful analysis to strictly obey the hard cardinality constraint. More specifically, we obtain a PTAS for any "planarizable" instance of MC and thus essentially for all cases where the corresponding SC instance can be tackled via the approach of Mustafa and Ray. As a corollary, we confirm the conjecture of Badanidiyuru, Kleinberg, and Lee [4] regarding real halfspaces in dimension three. We feel that our ideas could also be helpful in other geometric settings involving a cardinality constraint.Peer reviewe