In the past 20 years, increasing complexity in real world data has lead to
the study of higher-order data models based on partitioning hypergraphs.
However, hypergraph partitioning admits multiple formulations as hyperedges can
be cut in multiple ways. Building upon a class of hypergraph partitioning
problems introduced by Li & Milenkovic, we study the problem of minimizing
ratio-cut objectives over hypergraphs given by a new class of cut functions,
monotone submodular cut functions (mscf's), which captures hypergraph expansion
and conductance as special cases.
We first define the ratio-cut improvement problem, a family of local
relaxations of the minimum ratio-cut problem. This problem is a natural
extension of the Andersen & Lang cut improvement problem to the hypergraph
setting. We demonstrate the existence of efficient algorithms for approximately
solving this problem. These algorithms run in almost-linear time for the case
of hypergraph expansion, and when the hypergraph rank is at most O(1).
Next, we provide an efficient O(logn)-approximation algorithm for finding
the minimum ratio-cut of G. We generalize the cut-matching game framework of
Khandekar et. al. to allow for the cut player to play unbalanced cuts, and
matching player to route approximate single-commodity flows. Using this
framework, we bootstrap our algorithms for the ratio-cut improvement problem to
obtain approximation algorithms for minimum ratio-cut problem for all mscf's.
This also yields the first almost-linear time O(logn)-approximation
algorithms for hypergraph expansion, and constant hypergraph rank.
Finally, we extend a result of Louis & Makarychev to a broader set of
objective functions by giving a polynomial time O(lognβ)-approximation algorithm for the minimum ratio-cut problem based on
rounding β22β-metric embeddings.Comment: Comments and feedback welcom