We consider two optimization problems related to finding dense subgraphs. The densest at-least-k-subgraph problem (DalkS) is to find an induced subgraph of highest average degree among all subgraphs with at least k vertices, and the densest at-most-k-subgraph problem (DamkS) is defined similarly. These problems are related to the well-known densest k-subgraph problem (DkS), which is to find the densest subgraph on exactly k vertices. We show that DalkS can be approximated efficiently, while DamkS is nearly as hard to approximate as the densest k-subgraph problem.
We will briefly survey a few results on the complexity of the densest @math -subgraph problem. The best approximation algorithm known for the general problem (when @math is specified as part of the input) is the algorithm of Feige, Peleg, and Kortsarz @cite_7 , which has ratio @math for some @math . For any particular value of @math , the greedy algorithm of @cite_10 gives the ratio @math . Algorithms based on linear programming and semidefinite programming have produced approximation ratios better than @math for certain values of @math , but have not improved the approximation ratio of @math for the general case @cite_9 @cite_1 .
@cite_1 @cite_9 @cite_10 @cite_7
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We present an O(nlogn)-approximation algorithm for the problem of finding the sparsest spanner of a given directed graph G on n vertices. A spanner of a graph is a sparse subgraph that approximately preserves distances in the original graph. More precisely, given a graph G=(V,E) with nonnegative edge lengths d:E->R^>=^0 and a stretchk>=1, a subgraph H=(V,E"H) is a k-spanner of G if for every edge (s,t)@?E, the graph H contains a path from s to t of length at most [email protected]?d(s,t). The previous best approximation ratio was [email protected]?(n^2^ ^3), due to Dinitz and Krauthgamer (STOC @?11). We also improve the approximation ratio for the important special case of directed 3-spanners with unit edge lengths from [email protected]?(n) to O(n^1^ ^3logn). The best previously known algorithms for this problem are due to Berman, Raskhodnikova and Ruan (FSTTCS @?10) and Dinitz and Krauthgamer. The approximation ratio of our algorithm almost matches Dinitz and [email protected]?s lower bound for the integrality gap of a natural linear programming relaxation. Our algorithm directly implies an O(n^1^ ^3logn)-approximation for the 3-spanner problem on undirected graphs with unit lengths. An easy O(n)-approximation algorithm for this problem has been the best known for decades. Finally, we consider the Directed Steiner Forest problem: given a directed graph with edge costs and a collection of ordered vertex pairs, find a minimum-cost subgraph that contains a path between every prescribed pair. We obtain an approximation ratio of O(n^2^ ^3^+^@e) for any constant @e>0, which improves the O(n^@[email protected]?min(n^4^ ^5,m^2^ ^3)) ratio due to Feldman, Kortsarz and Nutov ([email protected]?12). We present two new approximation algorithms for the problem of finding a k-node connected spanning subgraph (directed or undirected) of minimum cost. The best known approximation guarantees for this problem were @math for both directed and undirected graphs, and @math for undirected graphs with @math , where @math is the number of nodes in the input graph. Our first algorithm has approximation ratio @math , which is @math except for very large values of @math , namely, @math . This algorithm is based on a new result on @math -connected @math -critical graphs, which is of independent interest in the context of graph theory. Our second algorithm uses the primal-dual method and has approximation ratio @math for all values of @math . Combining these two gives an algorithm with approximation ratio @math , which asymptotically improves the best known approximation guarantee for directed graphs for all values of @math , and for undirected graphs for @math . Moreover, this is the first algorithm that has an approximation guarantee better than @math for all values of @math . Our approximation ratio also provides an upper bound on the integrality gap of the standard LP-relaxation. A Fixed-Parameter Tractable ( ) @math -approximation algorithm for a minimization (resp. maximization) parameterized problem @math is an FPT algorithm that, given an instance @math computes a solution of cost at most @math (resp. @math ) if a solution of cost at most (resp. at least) @math exists; otherwise the output can be arbitrary. For well-known intractable problems such as the W[1]-hard Clique and W[2]-hard Set Cover problems, the natural question is whether we can get any -approximation. It is widely believed that both Clique and Set-Cover admit no FPT @math -approximation algorithm, for any increasing function @math . Assuming standard conjectures such as the Exponential Time Hypothesis (ETH) eth-paturi and the Projection Games Conjecture (PGC) r3 , we make the first progress towards proving this conjecture by showing that 1. Under the ETH and PGC, there exist constants @math such that the Set Cover problem does not admit an FPT approximation algorithm with ratio @math in @math time, where @math is the size of the universe and @math is the number of sets. 2. Unless @math , for every @math there exists a constant @math such that Clique has no FPT cost approximation with ratio @math in @math time, where @math is the number of vertices in the graph. In the second part of the paper we consider various W[1]-hard problems such as , , Directed Steiner Network and . For all these problem we give polynomial time @math -approximation algorithms for some small function @math (the largest approximation ratio we give is @math ). We prove the approximation ratio 8 5 for the metric s,t -path-TSP, and more generally for shortest connected T-joins. The algorithm that achieves this ratio is the simple "Best of Many" version of Christofides' algorithm (1976), suggested by An, Kleinberg and Shmoys (2012), which consists in determining the best Christofides s,t -tour out of those constructed from a family @math of trees having a convex combination dominated by an optimal solution x* of the Held-Karp relaxation. They give the approximation guarantee @math for such an s,t -tour, which is the first improvement after the 5 3 guarantee of Hoogeveen's Christofides type algorithm (1991). Cheriyan, Friggstad and Gao (2012) extended this result to a 13 8-approximation of shortest connected T-joins, for |T|≥4. The ratio 8 5 is proved by simplifying and improving the approach of An, Kleinberg and Shmoys that consists in completing x* 2 in order to dominate the cost of "parity correction" for spanning trees. We partition the edge-set of each spanning tree in @math into an s,t -path (or more generally, into a T-join) and its complement, which induces a decomposition of x*. This decomposition can be refined and then efficiently used to complete x* 2 without using linear programming or particular properties of T, but by adding to each cut deficient for x* 2 an individually tailored explicitly given vector, inherent in x*. A simple example shows that the Best of Many Christofides algorithm may not find a shorter s,t -tour than 3 2 times the incidentally common optima of the problem and of its fractional relaxation. We present the best known algorithms for approximating the minimum-size undirected @math -edge connected spanning subgraph. For simple graphs our approximation ratio is @math . The more precise version of this bound requires @math , and for all such @math it improves the long-standing performance ratio of Cheriyan and Thurimella [SIAM J. Comput., 30 (2000), pp. 528-560], @math . The improvement comes in two steps. First we show that for simple @math -edge connected graphs, any laminar family of degree @math sets is smaller than the general bound ( @math versus @math ). This immediately implies that iterated rounding improves the performance ratio of Cheriyan and Thurimella. The second step carefully chooses good edges for rounding. For multigraphs our approximation ratio is @math . This improves the previous ratio @math [H. N. Gabow, M. X. Goemans, E. Tardos, and D. P. Williamson, Networks, 53 (2009), pp. 345-357]. It is of interest since it is known that for some constant @math , an approximation ratio @math implies @math . Our approximation ratio extends to the minimum-size Steiner network problem, where @math denotes the average vertex demand. The algorithm exploits rounding properties of the first two linear programs in iterated rounding. We give a 7.18-approximation algorithm for the minimum latency problem that uses only @math calls to the prize-collecting Steiner tree (PCST) subroutine of Goemans and Williamson. This improves the previous best algorithms in both performance guarantee and running time. A previous algorithm of Goemans and Kleinberg for the minimum latency problem requires an approximation algorithm for the @math -minimum spanning tree ( @math -MST) problem which is called as a black box for each value of @math . Their algorithm can achieve an approximation factor of 10.77 while making @math PCST calls, a factor of 8.98 using @math PCST calls, or a factor of @math using @math PCST calls, via the @math -MST algorithms of Garg, Arya and Ramesh, and Arora and Karakostas, respectively. Here @math denotes the number of nodes in the instance, and @math is the largest edge cost in the input. In all cases, the running time is dominated by the PCST calls. Since the PCST subroutine can be implemented to run in @math time, the overall running time of our algorithm is @math . We also give a faster randomized version of our algorithm that achieves the same approximation guarantee in expectation, but uses only @math PCST calls, and derandomize it to obtain a deterministic algorithm with factor @math , using @math PCST calls. The basic idea for our improvement is that we do not treat the @math -MST algorithm as a black box. This allows us to take advantage of some special situations in which the PCST subroutine delivers a 2-approximate @math -MST. We are able to obtain the same approximation ratio that would be given by Goemans and Kleinberg if we had access to 2-approximate @math -MSTs for all values of @math , even though we have them only for some values of @math that we are not able to specify in advance. We also extend our algorithm to a weighted version of the minimum latency problem. This paper concerns the problem of computing the densest k-vertex subgraph of a given graph, namely, the subgraph with the most edges, or with the highest edges-to-vertices ratio. A sequence of approximation algorithms is developed for the problem, with each step yielding a better ratio at the cost of a more complicated solution. The approximation ratio of our final algorithm is O spl tilde (n sup 0.3885 ). We also present a method for converting an approximation algorithm for an unweighted graph problem (from a specific class of maximization problems) into one for the corresponding weighted problem, and apply it to the densest subgraph problem. > While in many graph mining applications it is crucial to handle a stream of updates efficiently in terms of both time and space, not much was known about achieving such type of algorithm. In this paper we study this issue for a problem which lies at the core of many graph mining applications called densest subgraph problem. We develop an algorithm that achieves time- and space-efficiency for this problem simultaneously. It is one of the first of its kind for graph problems to the best of our knowledge. Given an input graph, the densest subgraph is the subgraph that maximizes the ratio between the number of edges and the number of nodes. For any e>0, our algorithm can, with high probability, maintain a (4+e)-approximate solution under edge insertions and deletions using O(n) space and O(1) amortized time per update; here, @math is the number of nodes in the graph and O hides the O(polylog_ 1+e n) term. The approximation ratio can be improved to (2+e) with more time. It can be extended to a (2+e)-approximation sublinear-time algorithm and a distributed-streaming algorithm. Our algorithm is the first streaming algorithm that can maintain the densest subgraph in one pass. Prior to this, no algorithm could do so even in the special case of an incremental stream and even when there is no time restriction. The previously best algorithm in this setting required O(log n) passes [BahmaniKV12]. The space required by our algorithm is tight up to a polylogarithmic factor. The little Grothendieck problem consists of maximizing @math źijCijxixj for a positive semidefinite matrix C, over binary variables @math xiź ?1 . In this paper we focus on a natural generalization of this problem, the little Grothendieck problem over the orthogonal group. Given @math CźRdn?dn a positive semidefinite matrix, the objective is to maximize @math źijtrCijTOiOjT restricting @math Oi to take values in the group of orthogonal matrices @math Od, where @math Cij denotes the (ij)-th @math d?d block of C. We propose an approximation algorithm, which we refer to as Orthogonal-Cut, to solve the little Grothendieck problem over the group of orthogonal matrices @math Od and show a constant approximation ratio. Our method is based on semidefinite programming. For a given @math dź1, we show a constant approximation ratio of @math źR(d)2, where @math źR(d) is the expected average singular value of a @math d?d matrix with random Gaussian @math N0,1d i.i.d. entries. For @math d=1 we recover the known @math źR(1)2=2 ź approximation guarantee for the classical little Grothendieck problem. Our algorithm and analysis naturally extends to the complex valued case also providing a constant approximation ratio for the analogous little Grothendieck problem over the Unitary Group @math Ud. Orthogonal-Cut also serves as an approximation algorithm for several applications, including the Procrustes problem where it improves over the best previously known approximation ratio of @math 122. The little Grothendieck problem falls under the larger class of problems approximated by a recent algorithm proposed in the context of the non-commutative Grothendieck inequality. Nonetheless, our approach is simpler and provides better approximation with matching integrality gaps. Finally, we also provide an improved approximation algorithm for the more general little Grothendieck problem over the orthogonal (or unitary) group with rank constraints, recovering, when @math d=1, the sharp, known ratios. Given a matrix A e ℝ m ×n of rank r, and an integer k < r, the top k singular vectors provide the best rank-k approximation to A. When the columns of A have specific meaning, it is desirable to find (provably) "good" approximations to A k which use only a small number of columns in A. Proposed solutions to this problem have thus far focused on randomized algorithms. Our main result is a simple greedy deterministic algorithm with guarantees on the performance and the number of columns chosen. Specifically, our greedy algorithm chooses c columns from A with @math such that @math where C gr is the matrix composed of the c columns, @math is the pseudo-inverse of C gr ( @math is the best reconstruction of A from C gr), and ¼(A) is a measure of the coherence in the normalized columns of A. The running time of the algorithm is O(SVD(A k) + mnc) where SVD(A k) is the running time complexity of computing the first k singular vectors of A. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first deterministic algorithm with performance guarantees on the number of columns and a (1 + e) approximation ratio in Frobenius norm. The algorithm is quite simple and intuitive and is obtained by combining a generalization of the well known sparse approximation problem from information theory with an existence result on the possibility of sparse approximation. Tightening the analysis along either of these two dimensions would yield improved results. We present an @math -approximation algorithm for the problem of finding a @math -vertex connected spanning subgraph of minimum cost, where @math is the number of vertices in an input graph, and @math is a connectivity requirement. Our algorithm is the first that achieves a polylogarithmic approximation ratio for all values of @math and @math , and it works for both directed and undirected graphs. As in previous works, we use the Frank--Tardos algorithm for finding @math -outconnected subgraphs as a subroutine. However, with our structural lemmas, we are able to show that we need only partial solutions returned by the Frank--Tardos algorithm; thus, we can avoid paying the whole cost of an optimal solution every time the algorithm is applied. A 5 4-approximation algorithm is presented for the minimum cardinality 2-edge-connected spanning subgraph problem in undirected graphs. This improves the previous best approximation ratio of 4 3. It is shown that our ratio is tight with respect to current lower bounds, and any further improvement is possible only if new lower bounds are discovered. We introduce a new approach to isolate the real roots of a square-free polynomial @math with real coefficients. It is assumed that each coefficient of @math can be approximated to any specified error bound. The presented method is exact, complete and deterministic. Due to its similarities to the Descartes method, we also consider it practical and easy to implement. Compared to previous approaches, our new method achieves a significantly better bit complexity. It is further shown that the hardness of isolating the real roots of @math is exclusively determined by the geometry of the roots and not by the complexity or the size of the coefficients. For the special case where @math has integer coefficients of maximal bitsize @math , our bound on the bit complexity writes as @math which improves the best bounds known for existing practical algorithms by a factor of @math . The crucial idea underlying the new approach is to run an approximate version of the Descartes method, where, in each subdivision step, we only consider approximations of the intermediate results to a certain precision. We give an upper bound on the maximal precision that is needed for isolating the roots of @math . For integer polynomials, this bound is by a factor @math lower than that of the precision needed when using exact arithmetic explaining the improved bound on the bit complexity. In this paper we demonstrate a general method of designing constant-factor approximation algorithms for some discrete optimization problems with cardinality constraints. The core of the method is a simple deterministic ("pipage") procedure of rounding of linear relaxations. By using the method we design a (1-(1-1 k)k)-approximation algorithm for the maximum coverage problem where k is the maximum size of the subsets that are covered, and a 1 2-approximation algorithm for the maximum cut problem with given sizes of parts in the vertex set bipartition. The performance guarantee of the former improves on that of the well-known (1 - e-1)-greedy algorithm due to Cornuejols, Fisher and Nemhauser in each case of bounded k. The latter is, to the best of our knowledge, the first constant-factor algorithm for that version of the maximum cut problem. In this paper we study the densest subgraph problem, which plays a key role in many graph mining applications. The goal of the problem is to find a subset of nodes that induces a graph with maximum average degree. The problem has been extensively studied in the past few decades under a variety of different settings. Several exact and approximation algorithms were proposed. However, as normal graph can only model objects with pairwise relationships, the densest subgraph problem fails in identifying communities under relationships that involve more than 2 objects, e.g., in a network connecting authors by publications. We consider in this work the densest subgraph problem in hypergraphs, which generalizes the problem to a wider class of networks in which edges might have different cardinalities and contain more than 2 nodes. We present two exact algorithms and a near-linear time r-approximation algorithm for the problem, where r is the maximum cardinality of an edge in the hypergraph. We also consider the dynamic version of the problem, in which an adversary can insert or delete an edge from the hypergraph in each round and the goal is to maintain efficiently an approximation of the densest subgraph. We present two dynamic approximation algorithms in this paper with amortized polog update time, for any e > 0. For the case when there are only insertions, the approximation ratio we maintain is r(1+e), while for the fully dynamic case, the ratio is r2(1+e). Extensive experiments are performed on large real datasets to validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our algorithms. Reducing hidden bias in the data and ensuring fairness in algorithmic data analysis has recently received significant attention. We complement several recent papers in this line of research by introducing a general method to reduce bias in the data through random projections in a fair'' subspace. We apply this method to densest subgraph and @math -means. For densest subgraph, our approach based on fair projections allows to recover both theoretically and empirically an almost optimal, fair, dense subgraph hidden in the input data. We also show that, under the small set expansion hypothesis, approximating this problem beyond a factor of @math is NP-hard and we show a polynomial time algorithm with a matching approximation bound. We further apply our method to @math -means. In a previous paper, [NIPS 2017] showed that problems such as @math -means can be approximated up to a constant factor while ensuring that none of two protected class (e.g., gender, ethnicity) is disparately impacted. We show that fair projections generalize the concept of fairlet introduced by to any number of protected attributes and improve empirically the quality of the resulting clustering. We also present the first constant-factor approximation for an arbitrary number of protected attributes thus settling an open problem recently addressed in several works. An important question in theoretical computer science is to determine the best possible running time for solving a problem at hand. For geometric optimization problems, we often understand their complexity on a rough scale, but not very well on a finer scale. One such example is the two-dimensional knapsack problem for squares. There is a polynomial time (1 + ϵ)-approximation algorithm for it (i.e., a PTAS) but the running time of this algorithm is triple exponential in 1 ϵ, i.e., Ω(n221 ϵ). A double or triple exponential dependence on 1 ϵ is inherent in how this and several other algorithms for other geometric problems work. In this paper, we present an EPTAS for knapsack for squares, i.e., a (1+ϵ)-approximation algorithm with a running time of Oϵ(1)·nO(1). In particular, the exponent of n in the running time does not depend on ϵ at all! Since there can be no FPTAS for the problem (unless P = NP) this is the best kind of approximation scheme we can hope for. To achieve this improvement, we introduce two new key ideas: We present a fast method to guess the Ω(221 ϵ) relatively large squares of a suitable near-optimal packing instead of using brute-force enumeration. Secondly, we introduce an indirect guessing framework to define sizes of cells for the remaining squares. In the previous PTAS each of these steps needs a running time of Ω(n221 ϵ) and we improve both to Oϵ(1) · nO(1). We complete our result by giving an algorithm for two-dimensional knapsack for rectangles under (1 + ϵ)-resource augmentation. In this setting, we also improve the best known running time of Ω(n1 ϵ1 ϵ) to Oϵ(1) · nO(1) and compute even a solution with optimal profit, in contrast to the best previously known polynomial time algorithm for this setting that computes only an approximation. We believe that our new techniques have the potential to be useful for other settings as well. We investigate a natural online version of the well-known Maximum Directed Cut problem on DAGs. We propose a deterministic algorithm and show that it achieves a competitive ratio of @math . We then give a lower bound argument to show that no deterministic algorithm can achieve a ratio of @math for any ?>0 thus showing that our algorithm is essentially optimal. Then, we extend our technique to improve upon the analysis of an old result: we show that greedily derandomizing the trivial randomized algorithm for MaxDiCut in general graphs improves the competitive ratio from 4 to 3, and also provide a tight example. In the general search problem we want to identify a specific element using a set of allowed tests. The general goal is to minimize the number of tests performed, although different measures are used to capture this goal. In this work we introduce a novel greedy approach that achieves the best known approximation ratios simultaneously for many different variations of this identification problem. In addition to this flexibility, our algorithm admits much shorter and simpler analyses than previous greedy strategies. As a second contribution, we investigate the potential of greedy algorithms for the more restricted problem of identifying elements of partially ordered sets by comparison with other elements. We prove that the latter problem is as hard to approximate as the general identification problem. As a positive result, we show that a natural greedy strategy achieves an approximation ratio of 2 for tree-like posets, improving upon the previously best known 14-approximation for this problem. par>We prove some non-approximability results for restrictions of basic combinatorial optimization problems to instances of bounded “degreeror bounded “width.” Specifically: We prove that the Max 3SAT problem on instances where each variable occurs in at most B clauses, is hard to approximate to within a factor @math , unless @math . H stad [18] proved that the problem is approximable to within a factor @math in polynomial time, and that is hard to approximate to within a factor @math . Our result uses a new randomized reduction from general instances of Max 3SAT to bounded-occurrences instances. The randomized reduction applies to other Max SNP problems as well. We observe that the Set Cover problem on instances where each set has size at most B is hard to approximate to within a factor @math unless @math . The result follows from an appropriate setting of parameters in Feige's reduction [11]. This is essentially tight in light of the existence of @math -approximate algorithms [20, 23, 9] We present a new PCP construction, based on applying parallel repetition to the inner verifier,'' and we provide a tight analysis for it. Using the new construction, and some modifications to known reductions from PCP to Hitting Set, we prove that Hitting Set with sets of size B is hard to approximate to within a factor @math . The problem can be approximated to within a factor B [19], and it is the Vertex Cover problem for B =2. The relationship between hardness of approximation and set size seems to have not been explored before. We observe that the Independent Set problem on graphs having degree at most B is hard to approximate to within a factor @math , unless P = NP . This follows from a comination of results by Clementi and Trevisan [28] and Reingold, Vadhan and Wigderson [27]. It had been observed that the problem is hard to approximate to within a factor @math unless P = NP [1]. An algorithm achieving factor @math is also known [21, 2, 30, 16 .