No Arabic abstract
Diffusion is a fundamental graph procedure and has been a basic building block in a wide range of theoretical and empirical applications such as graph partitioning and semi-supervised learning on graphs. In this paper, we study computationally efficient diffusion primitives beyond random walk. We design an $widetilde{O}(m)$-time randomized algorithm for the $ell_2$-norm flow diffusion problem, a recently proposed diffusion model based on network flow with demonstrated graph clustering related applications both in theory and in practice. Examples include finding locally-biased low conductance cuts. Using a known connection between the optimal dual solution of the flow diffusion problem and the local cut structure, our algorithm gives an alternative approach for finding such cuts in nearly linear time. From a technical point of view, our algorithm contributes a novel way of dealing with inequality constraints in graph optimization problems. It adapts the high-level algorithmic framework of nearly linear time Laplacian system solvers, but requires several new tools: vertex elimination under constraints, a new family of graph ultra-sparsifiers, and accelerated proximal gradient methods with inexact proximal mapping computation.
We show that the edit distance between two strings of length $n$ can be computed within a factor of $f(epsilon)$ in $n^{1+epsilon}$ time as long as the edit distance is at least $n^{1-delta}$ for some $delta(epsilon) > 0$.
Linear regression in $ell_p$-norm is a canonical optimization problem that arises in several applications, including sparse recovery, semi-supervised learning, and signal processing. Generic convex optimization algorithms for solving $ell_p$-regression are slow in practice. Iteratively Reweighted Least Squares (IRLS) is an easy to implement family of algorithms for solving these problems that has been studied for over 50 years. However, these algorithms often diverge for p > 3, and since the work of Osborne (1985), it has been an open problem whether there is an IRLS algorithm that is guaranteed to converge rapidly for p > 3. We propose p-IRLS, the first IRLS algorithm that provably converges geometrically for any $p in [2,infty).$ Our algorithm is simple to implement and is guaranteed to find a $(1+varepsilon)$-approximate solution in $O(p^{3.5} m^{frac{p-2}{2(p-1)}} log frac{m}{varepsilon}) le O_p(sqrt{m} log frac{m}{varepsilon} )$ iterations. Our experiments demonstrate that it performs even better than our theoretical bounds, beats the standard Matlab/CVX implementation for solving these problems by 10--50x, and is the fastest among available implementations in the high-accuracy regime.
We consider the problem of efficiently scheduling jobs with precedence constraints on a set of identical machines in the presence of a uniform communication delay. In this setting, if two precedence-constrained jobs $u$ and $v$, with ($u prec v$), are scheduled on different machines, then $v$ must start at least $rho$ time units after $u$ completes. The scheduling objective is to minimize makespan, i.e. the total time between when the first job starts and the last job completes. The focus of this paper is to provide an efficient approximation algorithm with near-linear running time. We build on the algorithm of Lepere and Rapine [STACS 2002] for this problem to give an $Oleft(frac{ln rho}{ln ln rho} right)$-approximation algorithm that runs in $tilde{O}(|V| + |E|)$ time.
We consider the problem of center-based clustering in low-dimensional Euclidean spaces under the perturbation stability assumption. An instance is $alpha$-stable if the underlying optimal clustering continues to remain optimal even when all pairwise distances are arbitrarily perturbed by a factor of at most $alpha$. Our main contribution is in presenting efficient exact algorithms for $alpha$-stable clustering instances whose running times depend near-linearly on the size of the data set when $alpha ge 2 + sqrt{3}$. For $k$-center and $k$-means problems, our algorithms also achieve polynomial dependence on the number of clusters, $k$, when $alpha geq 2 + sqrt{3} + epsilon$ for any constant $epsilon > 0$ in any fixed dimension. For $k$-median, our algorithms have polynomial dependence on $k$ for $alpha > 5$ in any fixed dimension; and for $alpha geq 2 + sqrt{3}$ in two dimensions. Our algorithms are simple, and only require applying techniques such as local search or dynamic programming to a suitably modified metric space, combined with careful choice of data structures.
We give almost-linear-time algorithms for constructing sparsifiers with $n poly(log n)$ edges that approximately preserve weighted $(ell^{2}_2 + ell^{p}_p)$ flow or voltage objectives on graphs. For flow objectives, this is the first sparsifier construction for such mixed objectives beyond unit $ell_p$ weights, and is based on expander decompositions. For voltage objectives, we give the first sparsifier construction for these objectives, which we build using graph spanners and leverage score sampling. Together with the iterative refinement framework of [Adil et al, SODA 2019], and a new multiplicative-weights based constant-approximation algorithm for mixed-objective flows or voltages, we show how to find $(1+2^{-text{poly}(log n)})$ approximations for weighted $ell_p$-norm minimizing flows or voltages in $p(m^{1+o(1)} + n^{4/3 + o(1)})$ time for $p=omega(1),$ which is almost-linear for graphs that are slightly dense ($m ge n^{4/3 + o(1)}$).