We study the task of estimating the number of edges in a graph, where the access to the graph is provided via an independent set oracle. Independent set queries draw motivation from group testing and have applications to the complexity of decision versus counting problems. We give two algorithms to estimate the number of edges in an n-vertex graph, using (i) polylog(n) bipartite independent set queries

The fuzzy K-means problem is a popular generalization of the well-known K-means problem to soft clusterings. In this article, we present the first algorithmic study of the problem going beyond heuristics. Our main result is that, assuming a constant number of clusters, there is a polynomial time approximation scheme for the fuzzy K-means problem. As a part of our analysis, we also prove the existence

The complexity of (unbounded-arity) Max-CSPs under structural restrictions is poorly understood. The two most general hypergraph properties known to ensure tractability of Max-CSPs, β-acyclicity and bounded (incidence) MIM-width, are incomparable and lead to very different algorithms. We introduce the framework of point decompositions for hypergraphs and use it to derive a new sufficient condition

Given a simple polygon P on n vertices, two points x, y in P are said to be visible to each other if the line segment between x and y is contained in P. The Point Guard Art Gallery problem asks for a minimum set S such that every point in P is visible from a point in S. The Vertex Guard Art Gallery problem asks for such a set S subset of the vertices of P. A point in the set S is referred to as a guard

Online models that allow recourse can be highly effective in situations where classical online models are too pessimistic. One such problem is the online machine covering problem on identical machines. In this setting, jobs arrive one by one and must be assigned to machines with the objective of maximizing the minimum machine load. When a job arrives, we are allowed to reassign some jobs as long as

Let G=(V,E) be an n-vertices m-edges directed graph with edge weights in the range [1,W] for some parameter W, and sϵ V be a designated source. In this article, we address several variants of the problem of maintaining the (1+ε)-approximate shortest path from s to each vϵ V{s} in the presence of a failure of an edge or a vertex. From the graph theory perspective, we show that G has a subgraph H with

Fixed-parameter algorithms and kernelization are two powerful methods to solve NP-hard problems. Yet so far those algorithms have been largely restricted to static inputs. In this article, we provide fixed-parameter algorithms and kernelizations for fundamental NP-hard problems with dynamic inputs. We consider a variety of parameterized graph and hitting set problems that are known to have f(k)n1+o(1)

In this article, we introduce and study the Non-Uniform k-Center (NUkC) problem. Given a finite metric space (X, d) and a collection of balls of radii { r1 ≥ … ≥ rk}, the NUkC problem is to find a placement of their centers in the metric space and find the minimum dilation α, such that the union of balls of radius α ⋅ ri around the ith center covers all the points in X. This problem naturally arises

Given a set of obstacles and two points in the plane, is there a path between the two points that does not cross more than k different obstacles? Equivalently, can we remove k obstacles so that there is an obstacle-free path between the two designated points? This is a fundamental NP-hard problem that has undergone a tremendous amount of research work. The problem can be formulated and generalized

The edit distance between two rooted ordered trees with n nodes labeled from an alphabet Ʃ is the minimum cost of transforming one tree into the other by a sequence of elementary operations consisting of deleting and relabeling existing nodes, as well as inserting new nodes. Tree edit distance is a well-known generalization of string edit distance. The fastest known algorithm for tree edit distance

Consider a two-stage matching problem, where edges of an input graph are revealed in two stages (batches) and in each stage we have to immediately and irrevocably extend our matching using the edges from that stage. The natural greedy algorithm is half competitive. Even though there is a huge literature on online matching in adversarial vertex arrival model, no positive results were previously known

Given a text T of length n, we propose a deterministic online algorithm computing the sparse suffix array and the sparse longest common prefix array of T in O(c √ lg n + m lg m lg n lg* n) time with O(m) words of space under the premise that the space of T is rewritable, where m ≤ n is the number of suffixes to be sorted (provided online and arbitrarily), and c is the number of characters with m ≤

For a family of graphs ℱ, the Weighted ℱ Vertex Deletion problem, is defined as follows: given an n-vertex undirected graph G and a weight function w: V(G)࢐ ℝ, find a minimum weight subset S⊆ V(G) such that G-S belongs to ℱ. We devise a recursive scheme to obtain O(logO(1) n)-approximation algorithms for such problems, building upon the classical technique of finding balanced separators. We obtain

It was recently found that there are very close connections between the existence of additive spanners (subgraphs where all distances are preserved up to an additive stretch), distance preservers (subgraphs in which demand pairs have their distance preserved exactly), and pairwise spanners (subgraphs in which demand pairs have their distance preserved up to a multiplicative or additive stretch) [Abboud-Bodwin

The STEINER TREE problem is one of the most fundamental NP-complete problems, as it models many network design problems. Recall that an instance of this problem consists of a graph with edge weights and a subset of vertices (often called terminals); the goal is to find a subtree of the graph of minimum total weight that connects all terminals. A seminal paper by Erickson et al. [Math. Oper. Res., 1987{

An unceasing problem of our prevailing society is the fair division of goods. The problem of proportional cake cutting focuses on dividing a heterogeneous and divisible resource, the cake, among n players who value pieces according to their own measure function. The goal is to assign each player a not necessarily connected part of the cake that the player evaluates at least as much as her proportional

Let [n{ = {1, …, n} and let Ωn be the set of all mappings from [n{ to itself. Let f be a random uniform element of Ωn and let T(f) and B(f) denote, respectively, the least common multiple and the product of the length of the cycles of f. Harris proved in 1973 that T converges in distribution to a standard normal distribution and, in 2011, Schmutz obtained an asymptotic estimate on the logarithm of

The problem of online checkpointing is a classical problem with numerous applications that has been studied in various forms for almost 50 years. In the simplest version of this problem, a user has to maintain k memorized checkpoints during a long computation, where the only allowed operation is to move one of the checkpoints from its old time to the current time, and his goal is to keep the checkpoints

We present two new combinatorial tools for the design of parameterized algorithms. The first is a simple linear time randomized algorithm that given as input a d-degenerate graph G and an integer k, outputs an independent set Y, such that for every independent set X in G of size at most k, the probability that X is a subset of Y is at least (((d+1)kk) . k(d+1))-1. The second is a new (deterministic)

We give a new FPT algorithm testing isomorphism of n-vertex graphs of tree-width k in time 2kpolylog(k)n3, improving the FPT algorithm due to Lokshtanov, Pilipczuk, Pilipczuk, and Saurabh (FOCS 2014), which runs in time 2O(k5 log k)n5. Based on an improved version of the isomorphism-invariant graph decomposition technique introduced by Lokshtanov et al., we prove restrictions on the structure of the

The many-visits traveling salesperson problem (MV-TSP) asks for an optimal tour of n cities that visits each city c a prescribed number kc of times. Travel costs may be asymmetric, and visiting a city twice in a row may incur a non-zero cost. The MV-TSP problem finds applications in scheduling, geometric approximation, and Hamiltonicity of certain graph families.

We study the following structure learning problem for H-colorings. For a fixed (and known) constraint graph H with q colors, given access to uniformly random H-colorings of an unknown graph G=(V,E), how many samples are required to learn the edges of G? We give a characterization of the constraint graphs H for which the problem is identifiable for every G and show that there are identifiable constraint

We study the mixing time of random walks on small-world networks modelled as follows: starting with the 2-dimensional periodic grid, each pair of vertices {u,v} with distance d> 1 is added as a “long-range” edge with probability proportional to d-r, where r≥ 0 is a parameter of the model. Kleinberg [33{ studied a close variant of this network model and proved that the (decentralised) routing time is

In the Traveling Salesperson Problem with Neighborhoods (TSPN), we are given a collection of geometric regions in some space. The goal is to output a tour of minimum length that visits at least one point in each region. Even in the Euclidean plane, TSPN is known to be APX-hard [27{, which gives rise to studying more tractable special cases of the problem. In this article, we focus on the fundamental

It is a long-standing open problem whether the minimal dominating sets of a graph can be enumerated in output-polynomial time. In this article we investigate this problem in graph classes defined by forbidding an induced subgraph. In particular, we provide output-polynomial time algorithms for Kt-free graphs and for several related graph classes. This answers a question of Kanté et al. about enumeration

We study the problem of clustering the vertices of a weighted hypergraph such that on average the vertices of each edge can be covered by a small number of clusters. This problem has many applications, such as for designing medical tests, clustering files on disk servers, and placing network services on servers. The edges of the hypergraph model groups of items that are likely to be needed together

This article studies the fundamental problem of graph coloring in fully dynamic graphs. Since the problem of computing an optimal coloring, or even approximating it to within n1-ε for any ε > 0, is NP-hard in static graphs, there is no hope to achieve any meaningful computational results for general graphs in the dynamic setting. It is therefore only natural to consider the combinatorial aspects of

No abstract available.

The Lov\'{a}sz Local Lemma (LLL) is a probabilistic tool which shows that, if a collection of ``bad' events $\mathcal B$ in a probability space are not too likely and not too interdependent, then there is a positive probability that no bad-events in $\mathcal B$ occur. Moser \& Tardos (2010) gave sequential and parallel algorithms which transformed most applications of the variable-assignment LLL into