The arboricity of a graph is the minimum number of forests it can be partitioned into. Previous approximation schemes were nonconstructive, i.e., they only approximated the arboricity as a value without computing a corresponding forest partition, as they operate on the related pseudoforest partitions or the dual problem. We propose an algorithm for converting a partition of @math pseudoforests into a partition of @math forests in @math time, where @math is the inverse Ackermann function, when @math expected time is allowed for pre-computation of a perfect hash function. Without perfect hashing, we obtain @math with a data structure by Brodal and Fagerberg that stores graphs of arboricity @math . For every fixed @math , the latter result implies a constructive @math -approximation algorithm with runtime @math by using Kowalik's approximation scheme for pseudoforest partitions. Our algorithm might help in designing a faster exact arboricity algorithm. We also make several remarks on approximation algorithms for the pseudoarboricity and the equivalent graph orientations with smallest maximum indegree, and correct some mistakes made in the literature.
Kowalik's approximation scheme @cite_15 works by terminating Dinitz's algorithm early. It computes an @math -orientation in time @math . The aforementioned greedy algorithm computes an acyclic @math -orientation @cite_3 @cite_36 and a subgraph of density at least @math @cite_4 @cite_22 @cite_27 @cite_31 in linear time. It repeatedly removes the vertex of minimum degree and orients its unassigned edges towards it. Georgakopoulos and Politopoulos @cite_31 give a generalization to hypergraphs. Charikar @cite_27 and Khuller and Saha @cite_22 address directed graphs. The fractional orientation problem is dual to the densest subgraph problem @cite_27 .
@cite_31 @cite_4 @cite_22 @cite_36 @cite_3 @cite_27 @cite_15
2296110048 1986144992 2266714125 1967595345
The densest subgraph problem, which asks for a subgraph with the maximum edges-to-vertices ratio d∗, is solvable in polynomial time. We discuss algorithms for this problem and the computation of a graph orientation with the lowest maximum indegree, which is equal to ⌈d∗⌉. This value also equals the pseudoarboricity of the graph. We show that it can be computed in O(|E| √ log log d∗) time, and that better estimates can be given for graph classes where d∗ satisfies certain asymptotic bounds. These runtimes are achieved by accelerating a binary search with an approximation scheme, and a runtime analysis of Dinitz’s algorithm on flow networks where all arcs, except the source and sink arcs, have unit capacity. We experimentally compare implementations of various algorithms for the densest subgraph and pseudoarboricity problems. In flow-based algorithms, Dinitz’s algorithm performs significantly better than push-relabel algorithms on all instances tested. 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). Numerous graph mining applications rely on detecting subgraphs which are large near-cliques. Since formulations that are geared towards finding large near-cliques are hard and frequently inapproximable due to connections with the Maximum Clique problem, the poly-time solvable densest subgraph problem which maximizes the average degree over all possible subgraphs "lies at the core of large scale data mining" [10]. However, frequently the densest subgraph problem fails in detecting large near-cliques in networks. In this work, we introduce the k-clique densest subgraph problem, k ≥ 2. This generalizes the well studied densest subgraph problem which is obtained as a special case for k=2. For k=3 we obtain a novel formulation which we refer to as the triangle densest subgraph problem: given a graph G(V,E), find a subset of vertices S* such that τ(S*)=max limitsS ⊆ V t(S) |S|, where t(S) is the number of triangles induced by the set S. On the theory side, we prove that for any k constant, there exist an exact polynomial time algorithm for the k-clique densest subgraph problem . Furthermore, we propose an efficient 1 k-approximation algorithm which generalizes the greedy peeling algorithm of Asahiro and Charikar [8,18] for k=2. Finally, we show how to implement efficiently this peeling framework on MapReduce for any k ≥ 3, generalizing the work of Bahmani, Kumar and Vassilvitskii for the case k=2 [10]. On the empirical side, our two main findings are that (i) the triangle densest subgraph is consistently closer to being a large near-clique compared to the densest subgraph and (ii) the peeling approximation algorithms for both k=2 and k=3 achieve on real-world networks approximation ratios closer to 1 rather than the pessimistic 1 k guarantee. An interesting consequence of our work is that triangle counting, a well-studied computational problem in the context of social network analysis can be used to detect large near-cliques. Finally, we evaluate our proposed method on a popular graph mining application. 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.