Fast Hierarchical Clustering and Other Applications of Dynamic Closest Pairs

We develop data structures for dynamic closest pair problems with arbitrary distance functions, that do not necessarily come from any geometric structure on the objects. Based on a technique previously used by the author for Euclidean closest pairs, we show how to insert and delete objects from an n-object set, maintaining the closest pair, in O(n log^2 n) time per update and O(n) space. With quadratic space, we can instead use a quadtree-like structure to achieve an optimal time bound, O(n) per update. We apply these data structures to hierarchical clustering, greedy matching, and TSP heuristics, and discuss other potential applications in machine learning, Groebner bases, and local improvement algorithms for partition and placement problems. Experiments show our new methods to be faster in practice than previously used heuristics.Comment: 20 pages, 9 figures. A preliminary version of this paper appeared at the 9th ACM-SIAM Symp. on Discrete Algorithms, San Francisco, 1998, pp. 619-628. For source code and experimental results, see http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/projects/pairs

Using Battery Level as Metric for Graph Planarization

International audienceTopology control in wireless sensor networks is an important issue for scalability and energy efficiency. It is often based on graph reduction performed through the use of Gabriel Graph or Relative Neighborhood Graph. This graph reduction is usually based on geometric values. In this paper we tackle the problem of possible connectivity loss in the reduced graph by applying a battery level based reduction graph. Experiments are conducted to evaluate our proposition. Results are compared with RNG reduction which takes into account only the strength of the received signal (RSSI). Results show that our algorithm maintains network connectivity longer than solutions from the literature and balances the energy consumption over nodes

Simplices by point-sliding and the Yamnitsky-Levin algorithm

Yamnitsky and Levin proposed a variant of Khachiyan's ellopsoid method for testing feasibility of systems of linear inequalities that also runs in polynomial time but uses simplices instead of ellipsoids. Starting with then-simplexS and the half-space {x¦aTx ≤ β}, the algorithm finds a simplexSYL of small volume that enclosesS ∩ {x¦aTx ≤ β}. We interpretSYL as a simplex obtainable by point-sliding and show that the smallest such simplex can be determined by minimizing a simple strictly convex function. We furthermore discuss some numerical results. The results suggest that the number of iterations used by our method may be considerably less than that of the standard ellipsoid method

Drawing Unordered Trees on k-Grids

Abstract. We present almost linear area bounds for drawing complete trees on the octagonal grid. For 7-ary trees we establish an upper and lower bound of Θ(n 1.129) and for ternary trees the bounds of O(n 1.048) and Θ(n), where the latter needs edge bends. We explore the unit edge length and area complexity of drawing unordered trees on k-grids with k ∈ {4, 6, 8} and generalize the N P-hardness results of the orthogonal and hexagonal grid to the octagonal grid.

Delta-Confluent Drawings

We generalize the tree-confluent graphs to a broader class of graphs called Delta-confluent graphs. This class of graphs and distance-hereditary graphs, a well-known class of graphs, coincide. Some results about the visualization of Delta-confluent graphs are also given.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures. A preliminary version of this work was presented at the 13th Int. Symp. Graph Drawing, Limerick, Ireland, September 200