We continue the investigation of problems concerning correlation clustering or clustering with qualitative information, which is a clustering formulation that has been studied recently. The basic setup here is that we are given as input a complete graph on n nodes (which correspond to nodes to be clustered) whose edges are labeled + (for similar pairs of items) and - (for dissimilar pairs of items). Thus we have only as input qualitative information on similarity and no quantitative distance measure between items. The quality of a clustering is measured in terms of its number of agreements, which is simply the number of edges it correctly classifies, that is the sum of number of - edges whose endpoints it places in different clusters plus the number of + edges both of whose endpoints it places within the same cluster. In this paper, we study the problem of finding clusterings that maximize the number of agreements, and the complementary minimization version where we seek clusterings that minimize the number of disagreements. We focus on the situation when the number of clusters is stipulated to be a small constant k. Our main result is that for every k, there is a polynomial time approximation scheme for both maximizing agreements and minimizing disagreements. (The problems are NP-hard for every k >= 2.) The main technical work is for the minimization version, as the PTAS for maximizing agreements follows along the lines of the property tester for Max k-CUT. In contrast, when the number of clusters is not specified, the problem of minimizing disagreements was shown to be APX-hard, even though the maximization version admits a PTAS.
Another problem that has been considered, let us call it , is that of maximizing correlation, defined to be the difference between the number of agreements and disagreements. A factor @math approximation for on complete graphs is presented in @cite_16 . Recently @cite_14 showed an integrality gap of @math for the underlying semidefinite program used in @cite_16 . They also prove that an approximation of @math can be achieved on general graphs @math , where @math is the Lov ' a sz Theta Function.
@cite_14 @cite_16
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We introduce a new graph parameter, called the Grothendieck constant of a graph G=(V,E), which is defined as the least constant K such that for every A:E→ℝ, @math The classical Grothendieck inequality corresponds to the case of bipartite graphs, but the case of general graphs is shown to have various algorithmic applications. Indeed, our work is motivated by the algorithmic problem of maximizing the quadratic form ∑ u,v ∈E A(u,v)ϕ(u)ϕ(v) over all ϕ:V→ -1,1 , which arises in the study of correlation clustering and in the investigation of the spin glass model. We give upper and lower estimates for the integrality gap of this program. We show that the integrality gap is (O( ( G )) ), where ( ( G ) ) is the Lovasz Theta Function of the complement of G, which is always smaller than the chromatic number of G. This yields an efficient constant factor approximation algorithm for the above maximization problem for a wide range of graphs G. We also show that the maximum possible integrality gap is always at least Ω(log ω(G)), where ω(G) is the clique number of G. In particular it follows that the maximum possible integrality gap for the complete graph on n vertices with no loops is Θ(logn). More generally, the maximum possible integrality gap for any perfect graph with chromatic number n is Θ(logn). The lower bound for the complete graph improves a result of Kashin and Szarek on Gram matrices of uniformly bounded functions, and settles a problem of Megretski and of Charikar and Wirth. We consider the maximum independent set problem on graphs with maximum degree @math . We show that the integrality gap of the Lov 'asz @math -function based SDP is @math . This improves on the previous best result of @math , and almost matches the integrality gap of @math recently shown for stronger SDPs, namely those obtained using poly- @math levels of the @math semidefinite hierarchy. The improvement comes from an improved Ramsey-theoretic bound on the independence number of @math -free graphs for large values of @math . We also show how to obtain an algorithmic version of the above-mentioned @math -based integrality gap result, via a coloring algorithm of Johansson. The resulting approximation guarantee of @math matches the best unique-games-based hardness result up to lower-order poly- @math factors. We study integrality gaps and approximability of two closely related problems on directed graphs. Given a set V of n nodes in an underlying asymmetric metric and two specified nodes s and t, both problems ask to find an s-t path visiting all other nodes. In the asymmetric traveling salesman path problem (ATSPP), the objective is to minimize the total cost of this path. In the directed latency problem, the objective is to minimize the sum of distances on this path from s to each node. Both of these problems are NP-hard. The best known approximation algorithms for ATSPP had ratio O(log n) until the very recent result that improves it to O(log n log log n). However, only a bound of O(sqrt(n)) for the integrality gap of its linear programming relaxation has been known. For directed latency, the best previously known approximation algorithm has a guarantee of O(n^(1 2+eps)), for any constant eps > 0. We present a new algorithm for the ATSPP problem that has an approximation ratio of O(log n), but whose analysis also bounds the integrality gap of the standard LP relaxation of ATSPP by the same factor. This solves an open problem posed by Chekuri and Pal [2007]. We then pursue a deeper study of this linear program and its variations, which leads to an algorithm for the k-person ATSPP (where k s-t paths of minimum total length are sought) and an O(log n)-approximation for the directed latency 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 .