Randomized Composable Coresets for Matching and Vertex Cover

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