No Arabic abstract
A common approach for designing scalable algorithms for massive data sets is to distribute the computation across, say $k$, machines and process the data using limited communication between them. A particularly appealing framework here is the simultaneous communication model whereby each machine constructs a small representative summary of its own data and one obtains an approximate/exact solution from the union of the representative summaries. If the representative summaries needed for a problem are small, then this results in a communication-efficient and round-optimal protocol. While many fundamental graph problems admit efficient solutions in this model, two prominent problems are notably absent from the list of successes, namely, the maximum matching problem and the minimum vertex cover problem. Indeed, it was shown recently that for both these problems, even achieving a polylog$(n)$ approximation requires essentially sending the entire input graph from each machine. The main insight of our work is that the intractability of matching and vertex cover in the simultaneous communication model is inherently connected to an adversarial partitioning of the underlying graph across machines. We show that when the underlying graph is randomly partitioned across machines, both these problems admit randomized composable coresets of size $widetilde{O}(n)$ that yield an $widetilde{O}(1)$-approximate solution. This results in an $widetilde{O}(1)$-approximation simultaneous protocol for these problems with $widetilde{O}(nk)$ total communication when the input is randomly partitioned across $k$ machines. We further prove the optimality of our results. Finally, by a standard application of composable coresets, our results also imply MapReduce algorithms with the same approximation guarantee in one or two rounds of communication
We present a near-tight analysis of the average query complexity -- `a la Nguyen and Onak [FOCS08] -- of the randomized greedy maximal matching algorithm, improving over the bound of Yoshida, Yamamoto and Ito [STOC09]. For any $n$-vertex graph of average degree $bar{d}$, this leads to the following sublinear-time algorithms for estimating the size of maximum matching and minimum vertex cover, all of which are provably time-optimal up to logarithmic factors: $bullet$ A multiplicative $(2+epsilon)$-approximation in $widetilde{O}(n/epsilon^2)$ time using adjacency list queries. This (nearly) matches an $Omega(n)$ time lower bound for any multiplicative approximation and is, notably, the first $O(1)$-approximation that runs in $o(n^{1.5})$ time. $bullet$ A $(2, epsilon n)$-approximation in $widetilde{O}((bar{d} + 1)/epsilon^2)$ time using adjacency list queries. This (nearly) matches an $Omega(bar{d}+1)$ lower bound of Parnas and Ron [TCS07] which holds for any $(O(1), epsilon n)$-approximation, and improves over the bounds of [Yoshida et al. STOC09; Onak et al. SODA12] and [Kapralov et al. SODA20]: The former two take at least quadratic time in the degree which can be as large as $Omega(n^2)$ and the latter obtains a much larger approximation. $bullet$ A $(2, epsilon n)$-approximation in $widetilde{O}(n/epsilon^3)$ time using adjacency matrix queries. This (nearly) matches an $Omega(n)$ time lower bound in this model and improves over the $widetilde{O}(nsqrt{n})$-time $(2, epsilon n)$-approximate algorithm of [Chen, Kannan, and Khanna ICALP20]. It also turns out that any non-trivial multiplicative approximation in the adjacency matrix model requires $Omega(n^2)$ time, so the additive $epsilon n$ error is necessary too. As immediate corollaries, we get improved sublinear time estimators for (variants of) TSP and an improved AMPC algorithm for maximal matching.
Maximum weight matching is one of the most fundamental combinatorial optimization problems with a wide range of applications in data mining and bioinformatics. Developing distributed weighted matching algorithms is challenging due to the sequential nature of efficient algorithms for this problem. In this paper, we develop a simple distributed algorithm for the problem on general graphs with approximation guarantee of $2+varepsilon$ that (nearly) matches that of the sequential greedy algorithm. A key advantage of this algorithm is that it can be easily implemented in only two rounds of computation in modern parallel computation frameworks such as MapReduce. We also demonstrate the efficiency of our algorithm in practice on various graphs (some with half a trillion edges) by achieving objective values always close to what is achievable in the centralized setting.
Reconfiguration schedules, i.e., sequences that gradually transform one solution of a problem to another while always maintaining feasibility, have been extensively studied. Most research has dealt with the decision problem of whether a reconfiguration schedule exists, and the complexity of finding one. A prime example is the reconfiguration of vertex covers. We initiate the study of batched vertex cover reconfiguration, which allows to reconfigure multiple vertices concurrently while requiring that any adversarial reconfiguration order within a batch maintains feasibility. The latter provides robustness, e.g., if the simultaneous reconfiguration of a batch cannot be guaranteed. The quality of a schedule is measured by the number of batches until all nodes are reconfigured, and its cost, i.e., the maximum size of an intermediate vertex cover. To set a baseline for batch reconfiguration, we show that for graphs belonging to one of the classes ${mathsf{cycles, trees, forests, chordal, cactus, eventext{-}holetext{-}free, clawtext{-}free}}$, there are schedules that use $O(varepsilon^{-1})$ batches and incur only a $1+varepsilon$ multiplicative increase in cost over the best sequential schedules. Our main contribution is to compute such batch schedules in $O(varepsilon^{-1}log^* n)$ distributed time, which we also show to be tight. Further, we show that once we step out of these graph classes we face a very different situation. There are graph classes on which no efficient distributed algorithm can obtain the best (or almost best) existing schedule. Moreover, there are classes of bounded degree graphs which do not admit any reconfiguration schedules without incurring a large multiplicative increase in the cost at all.
We present a massively parallel algorithm, with near-linear memory per machine, that computes a $(2+varepsilon)$-approximation of minimum-weight vertex cover in $O(loglog d)$ rounds, where $d$ is the average degree of the input graph. Our result fills the key remaining gap in the state-of-the-art MPC algorithms for vertex cover and matching problems; two classic optimization problems, which are duals of each other. Concretely, a recent line of work---by Czumaj et al. [STOC18], Ghaffari et al. [PODC18], Assadi et al. [SODA19], and Gamlath et al. [PODC19]---provides $O(loglog n)$ time algorithms for $(1+varepsilon)$-approximate maximum weight matching as well as for $(2+varepsilon)$-approximate minimum cardinality vertex cover. However, the latter algorithm does not work for the general weighted case of vertex cover, for which the best known algorithm remained at $O(log n)$ time complexity.
We give efficient distributed algorithms for the minimum vertex cover problem in bipartite graphs in the CONGEST model. From KH{o}nigs theorem, it is well known that in bipartite graphs the size of a minimum vertex cover is equal to the size of a maximum matching. We first show that together with an existing $O(nlog n)$-round algorithm for computing a maximum matching, the constructive proof of KH{o}nigs theorem directly leads to a deterministic $O(nlog n)$-round CONGEST algorithm for computing a minimum vertex cover. We then show that by adapting the construction, we can also convert an emph{approximate} maximum matching into an emph{approximate} minimum vertex cover. Given a $(1-delta)$-approximate matching for some $delta>1$, we show that a $(1+O(delta))$-approximate vertex cover can be computed in time $O(D+mathrm{poly}(frac{log n}{delta}))$, where $D$ is the diameter of the graph. When combining with known graph clustering techniques, for any $varepsilonin(0,1]$, this leads to a $mathrm{poly}(frac{log n}{varepsilon})$-time deterministic and also to a slightly faster and simpler randomized $O(frac{log n}{varepsilon^3})$-round CONGEST algorithm for computing a $(1+varepsilon)$-approximate vertex cover in bipartite graphs. For constant $varepsilon$, the randomized time complexity matches the $Omega(log n)$ lower bound for computing a $(1+varepsilon)$-approximate vertex cover in bipartite graphs even in the LOCAL model. Our results are also in contrast to the situation in general graphs, where it is known that computing an optimal vertex cover requires $tilde{Omega}(n^2)$ rounds in the CONGEST model and where it is not even known how to compute any $(2-varepsilon)$-approximation in time $o(n^2)$.