We give a sharp lower bound on the number of matchings of a given size in a bipartite graph. When specialized to regular bipartite graphs, our results imply Friedland's Lower Matching Conjecture and Schrijver's theorem proven by Gurvits and Csikvari. Indeed, our work extends the recent work of Csikvari done for regular and bi-regular bipartite graphs. Moreover, our lower bounds are order optimal as they are attained for a sequence of @math -lifts of the original graph as well as for random @math -lifts of the original graph when @math tends to infinity. We then extend our results to permanents and subpermanents sums. For permanents, we are able to recover the lower bound of Schrijver recently proved by Gurvits using stable polynomials. Our proof is algorithmic and borrows ideas from the theory of local weak convergence of graphs, statistical physics and covers of graphs. We provide new lower bounds for subpermanents sums and obtain new results on the number of matching in random @math -lifts with some implications for the matching measure and the spectral measure of random @math -lifts as well as for the spectral measure of infinite trees.
At this stage, we should recall that computing the number of matchings falls into the class of @math -complete problems as well as the problem of counting the number of perfect matchings in a given bipartite graph, i.e. computing the permanent of an arbitrary @math matrix. By previous discussion, we see that if the graph is locally tree like, then the tree of self-avoiding paths and the universal cover are locally the same, and one can believe that our algorithm will compute a good approximation for counting matchings. This idea was formalized in @cite_36 and proved rigorously in @cite_38 for random graphs. Our Theorem shows that these results extend to random lifts. The lower bound in ) is called the (logarithm of the) Bethe permanent in the physics literature @cite_16 @cite_22 @cite_24 . Similar ideas using lifts or covers of graphs have appeared in the literature about message passing algorithms, see @cite_28 @cite_12 and references therein. We refer to @cite_26 for more results connecting Belief Propagation with our setting.
@cite_38 @cite_26 @cite_22 @cite_36 @cite_28 @cite_24 @cite_16 @cite_12
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We give a sharp lower bound on the number of matchings of a given size in a bipartite graph. When specialized to regular bipartite graphs, our results imply Friedland's Lower Matching Conjecture and Schrijver's theorem proven by Gurvits and Csikvari. Indeed, our work extends the recent work of Csikvari done for regular and bi-regular bipartite graphs. Moreover, our lower bounds are order optimal as they are attained for a sequence of @math -lifts of the original graph as well as for random @math -lifts of the original graph when @math tends to infinity. We then extend our results to permanents and subpermanents sums. For permanents, we are able to recover the lower bound of Schrijver recently proved by Gurvits using stable polynomials. Our proof is algorithmic and borrows ideas from the theory of local weak convergence of graphs, statistical physics and covers of graphs. We provide new lower bounds for subpermanents sums and obtain new results on the number of matching in random @math -lifts with some implications for the matching measure and the spectral measure of random @math -lifts as well as for the spectral measure of infinite trees. In this paper, we propose a general framework for graph matching which is suitable for different problems of pattern recognition. The pattern representation we assume is at the same time highly structured, like for classic syntactic and structural approaches, and of subsymbolic nature with real-valued features, like for connectionist and statistic approaches. We show that random walk based models, inspired by Google's PageRank, give rise to a spectral theory that nicely enhances the graph topological features at node level. As a straightforward consequence, we derive a polynomial algorithm for the classic graph isomorphism problem, under the restriction of dealing with Markovian spectrally distinguishable graphs (MSD), a class of graphs that does not seem to be easily reducible to others proposed in the literature. The experimental results that we found on different test-beds of the TC-15 graph database show that the defined MSD class "almost always" covers the database, and that the proposed algorithm is significantly more efficient than top scoring VF algorithm on the same data. Most interestingly, the proposed approach is very well-suited for dealing with partial and approximate graph matching problems, derived for instance from image retrieval tasks. We consider the objects of the COIL-100 visual collection and provide a graph-based representation, whose node's labels contain appropriate visual features. We show that the adoption of classic bipartite graph matching algorithms offers a straightforward generalization of the algorithm given for graph isomorphism and, finally, we report very promising experimental results on the COIL-100 visual collection. Copyright © 2017, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. Motivated by the fact that in several cases a matching in a graph is stable if and only if it is produced by a greedy algorithm, we study the problem of computing a maximum weight greedy matching on weighted graphs, termed GREEDY-MATCHING. In wide contrast to the maximum weight matching problem, for which many efficient algorithms are known, we prove that GREEDYMATCHING is strongly NP-hard and APX-complete, and thus it does not admit a PTAS unless P=NP, even on graphs with maximum degree at most 3 and with at most three different integer edge weights. Furthermore we prove that GREEDYMATCHING is strongly NP-hard if the input graph is in addition bipartite. Moreover we consider three natural parameters of the problem, for which we establish a sharp threshold behavior between NP-hardness and computational tractability. On the positive side, we present a randomized approximation algorithm (RGMA) for GREEDYMATCHING on a special class of weighted graphs, called bush graphs. We highlight an unexpected connection between RGMA and the approximation of maximum cardinality matching in unweighted graphs via randomized greedy algorithms. We show that, if the approximation ratio of RGMA is θ, then for every ϵ > 0 the randomized MRG algorithm of ( 1995) gives a (ρ - ϵ)-approximation for the maximum cardinality matching. We conjecture that a tight bound for ρ is 2 3; we prove our conjecture true for four subclasses of bush graphs. Proving a tight bound for the approximation ratio of MRG on unweighted graphs (and thus also proving a tight value for ρ) is a long-standing open problem (Poloczek and Szegedy 2012). This unexpected relation of our RGMA algorithm with the MRG algorithm may provide new insights for solving this problem. This paper is motivated by two applications, namely i) generalizations of cuckoo hashing, a computationally simple approach to assigning keys to objects, and ii) load balancing in content distribution networks, where one is interested in determining the impact of content replication on performance. These two problems admit a common abstraction: in both scenarios, performance is characterized by the maximum weight of a generalization of a matching in a bipartite graph, featuring node and edge capacities. Our main result is a law of large numbers characterizing the asymptotic maximum weight matching in the limit of large bipartite random graphs, when the graphs admit a local weak limit that is a tree. This result specializes to the two application scenarios, yielding new results in both contexts. In contrast with previous results, the key novelty is the ability to handle edge capacities with arbitrary integer values. An analysis of belief propagation algorithms (BP) with multivariate belief vectors underlies the proof. In particular, we show convergence of the corresponding BP by exploiting monotonicity of the belief vectors with respect to the so-called upshifted likelihood ratio stochastic order. This auxiliary result can be of independent interest, providing a new set of structural conditions which ensure convergence of BP.