We show that in any graph, the average length of a flow path in an electrical flow between the endpoints of a random edge is $O(log^2 n)$. This is a consequence of a more general result which shows that the spectral norm of the entrywise absolute value of the transfer impedance matrix of a graph is $O(log^2 n)$. This result implies a simple oblivious routing scheme based on electrical flows in the case of transitive graphs.
We study the problem of finding flows in undirected graphs so as to minimize the weighted $p$-norm of the flow for any $p > 1$. When $p=2$, the problem is that of finding an electrical flow, and its dual is equivalent to solving a Laplacian linear system. The case $p = infty$ corresponds to finding a min-congestion flow, which is equivalent to max-flows. A typical algorithmic construction for such problems considers vertex potentials corresponding to the flow conservation constraints, and has two simple types of update steps: cycle toggling, which modifies the flow along a cycle, and cut toggling, which modifies all potentials on one side of a cut. Both types of steps are typically performed relative to a spanning tree $T$; then the cycle is a fundamental cycle of $T$, and the cut is a fundamental cut of $T$. In this paper, we show that these simple steps can be used to give a novel efficient implementation for the $p = 2$ case and to find near-optimal $p$-norm flows in a low number of iterations for all values of $p > 1$. Compared to known faster algorithms for these problems, our algorithms are simpler, more combinatorial, and also expose several underlying connections between these algorithms and dynamic graph data structures that have not been formalized previously.
It is known that testing isomorphism of chordal graphs is as hard as the general graph isomorphism problem. Every chordal graph can be represented as the intersection graph of some subtrees of a tree. The leafage of a chordal graph, is defined to be the minimum number of leaves in the representing tree. We construct a fixed-parameter tractable algorithm testing isomorphism of chordal graphs with bounded leafage. The key point is a fixed-parameter tractable algorithm finding the automorphism group of a colored order-3 hypergraph with bounded sizes of color classes of vertices.
When modeling an application of practical relevance as an instance of a combinatorial problem X, we are often interested not merely in finding one optimal solution for that instance, but in finding a sufficiently diverse collection of good solutions. In this work we initiate a systematic study of diversity from the point of view of fixed-parameter tractability theory. First, we consider an intuitive notion of diversity of a collection of solutions which suits a large variety of combinatorial problems of practical interest. We then present an algorithmic framework which --automatically-- converts a tree-decomposition-based dynamic programming algorithm for a given combinatorial problem X into a dynamic programming algorithm for the diverse version of X. Surprisingly, our algorithm has a polynomial dependence on the diversity parameter.
We consider the {em vector partition problem}, where $n$ agents, each with a $d$-dimensional attribute vector, are to be partitioned into $p$ parts so as to minimize cost which is a given function on the sums of attribute vectors in each part. The problem has applications in a variety of areas including clustering, logistics and health care. We consider the complexity and parameterized complexity of the problem under various assumptions on the natural parameters $p,d,a,t$ of the problem where $a$ is the maximum absolute value of any attribute and $t$ is the number of agent types, and raise some of the many remaining open problems.
In this work, we consider a variant of the classical Longest Common Subsequence problem called Doubly-Constrained Longest Common Subsequence (DC-LCS). Given two strings s1 and s2 over an alphabet A, a set C_s of strings, and a function Co from A to N, the DC-LCS problem consists in finding the longest subsequence s of s1 and s2 such that s is a supersequence of all the strings in Cs and such that the number of occurrences in s of each symbol a in A is upper bounded by Co(a). The DC-LCS problem provides a clear mathematical formulation of a sequence comparison problem in Computational Biology and generalizes two other constrained variants of the LCS problem: the Constrained LCS and the Repetition-Free LCS. We present two results for the DC-LCS problem. First, we illustrate a fixed-parameter algorithm where the parameter is the length of the solution. Secondly, we prove a parameterized hardness result for the Constrained LCS problem when the parameter is the number of the constraint strings and the size of the alphabet A. This hardness result also implies the parameterized hardness of the DC-LCS problem (with the same parameters) and its NP-hardness when the size of the alphabet is constant.