We consider a new problem of designing a network with small @math - @math effective resistance. In this problem, we are given an undirected graph @math , two designated vertices @math , and a budget @math . The goal is to choose a subgraph of @math with at most @math edges to minimize the @math - @math effective resistance. This problem is an interpolation between the shortest path problem and the minimum cost flow problem and has applications in electrical network design. We present several algorithmic and hardness results for this problem and its variants. On the hardness side, we show that the problem is NP-hard, and the weighted version is hard to approximate within a factor smaller than two assuming the small-set expansion conjecture. On the algorithmic side, we analyze a convex programming relaxation of the problem and design a constant factor approximation algorithm. The key of the rounding algorithm is a randomized path-rounding procedure based on the optimality conditions and a flow decomposition of the fractional solution. We also use dynamic programming to obtain a fully polynomial time approximation scheme when the input graph is a series-parallel graph, with better approximation ratio than the integrality gap of the convex program for these graphs.
Spectral connectivity requirements were also studied, including spectral gap @cite_1 @cite_11 (closely related to graph expansion), total effective resistances @cite_8 , and mixing time @cite_13 . Some of the earlier works only proposed convex programming relaxations and heuristic algorithms. Approximation guarantees are only obtained in two recent papers for the more general experimental design problem. When every edge has the same cost, there is a @math -approximation algorithm for minimizing the total effective resistance when the budget is at least @math @cite_31 , and there is a @math -approximation algorithm for maximizing the spectral gap when the budget is at least @math @cite_5 . For our problem, the interesting regime is when @math is much smaller than @math , where the techniques in @cite_5 @cite_31 do not apply. We have developed a set of new techniques for analyzing and rounding the solutions to the convex program that will hopefully find applications for solving related problems.
@cite_8 @cite_1 @cite_5 @cite_31 @cite_13 @cite_11
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We give an approximation algorithm for non-uniform sparsest cut with the following guarantee: For any @math , given cost and demand graphs with edge weights @math respectively, we can find a set @math with @math at most @math times the optimal non-uniform sparsest cut value, in time @math provided @math . Here @math is the @math 'th smallest generalized eigenvalue of the Laplacian matrices of cost and demand graphs; @math (resp. @math ) is the weight of edges crossing the @math cut in cost (resp. demand) graph and @math is the sparsity of the optimal cut. In words, we show that the non-uniform sparsest cut problem is easy when the generalized spectrum grows moderately fast. To the best of our knowledge, there were no results based on higher order spectra for non-uniform sparsest cut prior to this work. Even for uniform sparsest cut, the quantitative aspects of our result are somewhat stronger than previous methods. Similar results hold for other expansion measures like edge expansion, normalized cut, and conductance, with the @math 'th smallest eigenvalue of the normalized Laplacian playing the role of @math in the latter two cases. Our proof is based on an l1-embedding of vectors from a semi-definite program from the Lasserre hierarchy. The embedded vectors are then rounded to a cut using standard threshold rounding. We hope that the ideas connecting @math -embeddings to Lasserre SDPs will find other applications. Another aspect of the analysis is the adaptation of the column selection paradigm from our earlier work on rounding Lasserre SDPs [GS11] to pick a set of edges rather than vertices. This feature is important in order to extend the algorithms to non-uniform sparsest cut. We present algorithmic and hardness results for network design problems with degree or order constraints. The first problem we consider is the Survivable Network Design problem with degree constraints on vertices. The objective is to find a minimum cost subgraph which satisfies connectivity requirements between vertices and also degree upper bounds @math on the vertices. This includes the well-studied Minimum Bounded Degree Spanning Tree problem as a special case. Our main result is a @math -approximation algorithm for the edge-connectivity Survivable Network Design problem with degree constraints, where the cost of the returned solution is at most twice the cost of an optimum solution (satisfying the degree bounds) and the degree of each vertex @math is at most @math . This implies the first constant factor (bicriteria) approximation algorithms for many degree constrained network design problems, including the Minimum Bounded Degree Steiner Forest problem. Our results also extend to directed graphs and provide the first constant factor (bicriteria) approximation algorithms for the Minimum Bounded Degree Arborescence problem and the Minimum Bounded Degree Strongly @math -Edge-Connected Subgraph problem. In contrast, we show that the vertex-connectivity Survivable Network Design problem with degree constraints is hard to approximate, even when the cost of every edge is zero. A striking aspect of our algorithmic result is its simplicity. It is based on the iterative relaxation method, which is an extension of Jain's iterative rounding method. This provides an elegant and unifying algorithmic framework for a broad range of network design problems. We also study the problem of finding a minimum cost @math -edge-connected subgraph with at least @math vertices, which we call the @math -subgraph problem. This generalizes some well-studied classical problems such as the @math -MST and the minimum cost @math -edge-connected subgraph problems. We give a polylogarithmic approximation for the @math -subgraph problem. However, by relating it to the Densest @math -Subgraph problem, we provide evidence that the @math -subgraph problem might be hard to approximate for arbitrary @math . The problem has found applications in computer vision, computer graphics, and sensor network localization, among others. Its least squares solution can be approximated by either spectral relaxation or semidefinite programming followed by a rounding procedure, analogous to the approximation algorithms of MAX-CUT. The contribution of this paper is three-fold: First, we introduce a robust penalty function involving the sum of unsquared deviations and derive a relaxation that leads to a convex optimization problem; Second, we apply the alternating direction method to minimize the penalty function; Finally, under a specific model of the measurement noise and for both complete and random measurement graphs, we prove that the rotations are exactly and stably recovered, exhibiting a phase transition behavior in terms of the proportion of noisy measurements. Numerical simulations confirm the phase transition behavior for our method as well as its improved accuracy compared to existing methods. We study computationally hard combinatorial problems arising from the important engineering question of how to maximize the number of connections that can be simultaneously served in a wavelength division ultiplexing (WDM) optical network. In such networks, WDM technology can satisfy a set of connections by computing a route and assigning a wavelength to each connection so that no two connections routed through the same fiber are assigned the same wavelength. Each fiber supports a limited number of @math wavelengths and in order to fully exploit the parallelism provided by the technology, one should select a set of connections of maximum cardinality which can be satisfied using the available wavelengths. This is known as the maximum routing and path coloring (maxRPC) problem. Our main contribution is a general analysis method for a class of iterative algorithms for a more general coloring problem. A lower bound on the benefit of the solution computed by such an algorithm in terms of the optimal benefit and the number of available wavelengths is given by a benefit-revealing linear program. We apply this method to maxRPC in both undirected and bidirected rings to obtain upper bounds on the approximation ratio of several algorithms. The best bounds obtained are @math and @math for undirected and bidirected rings; these results improve known bounds of @math and @math , respectively. Our results extend to multifiber ring networks and also apply to the maximum path coloring (maxPC) problem, where paths instead of connection requests are given as part of the input. We also study the profit version of maxPC in rings where each path has a profit and the objective is to satisfy a set of paths of maximum total profit. We present an algorithm based on linear programming and randomized rounding with approximation ratio 1.49015, improving on the @math bound obtained by a simple iterative algorithm.