No Arabic abstract
We study algorithms based on local improvements for the $k$-Set Packing problem. The well-known local improvement algorithm by Hurkens and Schrijver has been improved by Sviridenko and Ward from $frac{k}{2}+epsilon$ to $frac{k+2}{3}$, and by Cygan to $frac{k+1}{3}+epsilon$ for any $epsilon>0$. In this paper, we achieve the approximation ratio $frac{k+1}{3}+epsilon$ for the $k$-Set Packing problem using a simple polynomial-time algorithm based on the method by Sviridenko and Ward. With the same approximation guarantee, our algorithm runs in time singly exponential in $frac{1}{epsilon^2}$, while the running time of Cygans algorithm is doubly exponential in $frac{1}{epsilon}$. On the other hand, we construct an instance with locality gap $frac{k+1}{3}$ for any algorithm using local improvements of size $O(n^{1/5})$, here $n$ is the total number of sets. Thus, our approximation guarantee is optimal with respect to results achievable by algorithms based on local improvements.
We present a packing-based approximation algorithm for the $k$-Set Cover problem. We introduce a new local search-based $k$-set packing heuristic, and call it Restricted $k$-Set Packing. We analyze its tight approximation ratio via a complicated combinatorial argument. Equipped with the Restricted $k$-Set Packing algorithm, our $k$-Set Cover algorithm is composed of the $k$-Set Packing heuristic cite{schrijver} for $kgeq 7$, Restricted $k$-Set Packing for $k=6,5,4$ and the semi-local $(2,1)$-improvement cite{furer} for 3-Set Cover. We show that our algorithm obtains a tight approximation ratio of $H_k-0.6402+Theta(frac{1}{k})$, where $H_k$ is the $k$-th harmonic number. For small $k$, our results are 1.8667 for $k=6$, 1.7333 for $k=5$ and 1.5208 for $k=4$. Our algorithm improves the currently best approximation ratio for the $k$-Set Cover problem of any $kgeq 4$.
We study emph{parallel} online algorithms: For some fixed integer $k$, a collective of $k$ parallel processes that perform online decisions on the same sequence of events forms a $k$-emph{copy algorithm}. For any given time and input sequence, the overall performance is determined by the best of the $k$ individual total results. Problems of this type have been considered for online makespan minimization; they are also related to optimization with emph{advice} on future events, i.e., a number of bits available in advance. We develop textsc{Predictive Harmonic}$_3$ (PH3), a relatively simple family of $k$-copy algorithms for the online Bin Packing Problem, whose joint competitive factor converges to 1.5 for increasing $k$. In particular, we show that $k=6$ suffices to guarantee a factor of $1.5714$ for PH3, which is better than $1.57829$, the performance of the best known 1-copy algorithm textsc{Advanced Harmonic}, while $k=11$ suffices to achieve a factor of $1.5406$, beating the known lower bound of $1.54278$ for a single online algorithm. In the context of online optimization with advice, our approach implies that 4 bits suffice to achieve a factor better than this bound of $1.54278$, which is considerably less than the previous bound of 15 bits.
We consider the class of packing integer programs (PIPs) that are column sparse, i.e. there is a specified upper bound k on the number of constraints that each variable appears in. We give an (ek+o(k))-approximation algorithm for k-column sparse PIPs, improving on recent results of $k^2cdot 2^k$ and $O(k^2)$. We also show that the integrality gap of our linear programming relaxation is at least 2k-1; it is known that k-column sparse PIPs are $Omega(k/ log k)$-hard to approximate. We also extend our result (at the loss of a small constant factor) to the more general case of maximizing a submodular objective over k-column sparse packing constraints.
Several algorithms with an approximation guarantee of $O(log n)$ are known for the Set Cover problem, where $n$ is the number of elements. We study a generalization of the Set Cover problem, called the Partition Set Cover problem. Here, the elements are partitioned into $r$ emph{color classes}, and we are required to cover at least $k_t$ elements from each color class $mathcal{C}_t$, using the minimum number of sets. We give a randomized LP-rounding algorithm that is an $O(beta + log r)$ approximation for the Partition Set Cover problem. Here $beta$ denotes the approximation guarantee for a related Set Cover instance obtained by rounding the standard LP. As a corollary, we obtain improved approximation guarantees for various set systems for which $beta$ is known to be sublogarithmic in $n$. We also extend the LP rounding algorithm to obtain $O(log r)$ approximations for similar generalizations of the Facility Location type problems. Finally, we show that many of these results are essentially tight, by showing that it is NP-hard to obtain an $o(log r)$-approximation for any of these problems.
We consider the online Min-Sum Set Cover (MSSC), a natural and intriguing generalization of the classical list update problem. In Online MSSC, the algorithm maintains a permutation on $n$ elements based on subsets $S_1, S_2, ldots$ arriving online. The algorithm serves each set $S_t$ upon arrival, using its current permutation $pi_{t}$, incurring an access cost equal to the position of the first element of $S_t$ in $pi_{t}$. Then, the algorithm may update its permutation to $pi_{t+1}$, incurring a moving cost equal to the Kendall tau distance of $pi_{t}$ to $pi_{t+1}$. The objective is to minimize the total access and moving cost for serving the entire sequence. We consider the $r$-uniform version, where each $S_t$ has cardinality $r$. List update is the special case where $r = 1$. We obtain tight bounds on the competitive ratio of deterministic online algorithms for MSSC against a static adversary, that serves the entire sequence by a single permutation. First, we show a lower bound of $(r+1)(1-frac{r}{n+1})$ on the competitive ratio. Then, we consider several natural generalizations of successful list update algorithms and show that they fail to achieve any interesting competitive guarantee. On the positive side, we obtain a $O(r)$-competitive deterministic algorithm using ideas from online learning and the multiplicative weight updates (MWU) algorithm. Furthermore, we consider efficient algorithms. We propose a memoryless online algorithm, called Move-All-Equally, which is inspired by the Double Coverage algorithm for the $k$-server problem. We show that its competitive ratio is $Omega(r^2)$ and $2^{O(sqrt{log n cdot log r})}$, and conjecture that it is $f(r)$-competitive. We also compare Move-All-Equally against the dynamic optimal solution and obtain (almost) tight bounds by showing that it is $Omega(r sqrt{n})$ and $O(r^{3/2} sqrt{n})$-competitive.