Approximating the Minimum Logarithmic Arrangement Problem

Abstract

We study a graph reordering problem motivated by compressing massive graphs such as social networks and inverted indexes. Given a graph, G = (V, E), the Minimum Logarithmic Arrangement problem is to find a permutation, ?, of the vertices that minimizes ?_{(u, v) ? E} (1 + ? lg |?(u) - ?(v)| ?). This objective has been shown to be a good measure of how many bits are needed to encode the graph if the adjacency list of each vertex is encoded using relative positions of two consecutive neighbors under the ? order in the list rather than using absolute indices or node identifiers, which requires at least lg n bits per edge. We show the first non-trivial approximation factor for this problem by giving a polynomial time ?(log k)-approximation algorithm for graphs with treewidth k