Covering the basic techniques used in the latest research work, the author consolidates progress made so far, including some very recent and promising results, and conveys the beauty and excitement of work in the field. He gives clear, lucid explanations of key results and ideas, with intuitive proofs, and provides critical examples and numerous illustrations to help elucidate the algorithms. Many of the results presented have been simplified and new insights provided. Of interest to theoretical computer scientists, operations researchers, and discrete mathematicians.

Approximation Algorithms

This beginning graduate textbook describes both recent achievements and classical results of computational complexity theory. Requiring essentially no background apart from mathematical maturity, the book can be used as a reference for self-study for anyone interested in complexity, including physicists, mathematicians, and other scientists, as well as a textbook for a variety of courses and seminars. More than 300 exercises are included with a selected hint set.

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Computational Complexity: A Modern Approach

Given a collection ℱ of subsets of S = {1,…,n}, set cover is the problem of selecting as few as possible subsets from ℱ such that their union covers S,, and max k-cover is the problem of selecting k subsets from ℱ such that their union has maximum cardinality. Both these problems are NP-hard. We prove that (1 - o(1)) ln n is a threshold below which set cover cannot be approximated efficiently, unless NP has slightly superpolynomial time algorithms. This closes the gap (up to low-order terms) between the ratio of approximation achievable by the greedy alogorithm (which is (1 - o(1)) ln n), and provious results of Lund and Yanakakis, that showed hardness of approximation within a ratio of (log2n) / 2 ≃0.72 ln n. For max k-cover, we show an approximation threshold of (1 - 1/e)(up to low-order terms), under assumption that P ≠ NP.

/pdf/a-threshold-of-ln-n-for-approximating-set-cover-3tgfinxlup.pdf

A threshold of ln n for approximating set cover

We survey the current techniques to cope with the problem of string matching that allows errors. This is becoming a more and more relevant issue for many fast growing areas such as information retrieval and computational biology. We focus on online searching and mostly on edit distance, explaining the problem and its relevance, its statistical behavior, its history and current developments, and the central ideas of the algorithms and their complexities. We present a number of experiments to compare the performance of the different algorithms and show which are the best choices. We conclude with some directions for future work and open problems.

/pdf/a-guided-tour-to-approximate-string-matching-22fowlmq5b.pdf

A guided tour to approximate string matching

(MATH) A locality sensitive hashing scheme is a distribution on a family $\F$ of hash functions operating on a collection of objects, such that for two objects x,y, PrheF[h(x) = h(y)] = sim(x,y), where sim(x,y) e [0,1] is some similarity function defined on the collection of objects. Such a scheme leads to a compact representation of objects so that similarity of objects can be estimated from their compact sketches, and also leads to efficient algorithms for approximate nearest neighbor search and clustering. Min-wise independent permutations provide an elegant construction of such a locality sensitive hashing scheme for a collection of subsets with the set similarity measure sim(A,B) = \frac{|A ∩ B|}{|A ∪ B|}.(MATH) We show that rounding algorithms for LPs and SDPs used in the context of approximation algorithms can be viewed as locality sensitive hashing schemes for several interesting collections of objects. Based on this insight, we construct new locality sensitive hashing schemes for:A collection of vectors with the distance between → \over u and → \over v measured by O(→ \over u, → \over v)/π, where O(→ \over u, → \over v) is the angle between → \over u) and → \over v). This yields a sketching scheme for estimating the cosine similarity measure between two vectors, as well as a simple alternative to minwise independent permutations for estimating set similarity.A collection of distributions on n points in a metric space, with distance between distributions measured by the Earth Mover Distance (EMD), (a popular distance measure in graphics and vision). Our hash functions map distributions to points in the metric space such that, for distributions P and Q, EMD(P,Q) ≤ Ehe\F [d(h(P),h(Q))] ≤ O(log n log log n). EMD(P, Q).

/pdf/similarity-estimation-techniques-from-rounding-algorithms-1i3hjl99zj.pdf

Similarity estimation techniques from rounding algorithms

A new algebraic technique for the construction of interactive proof systems is presented. Our technique is used to prove that every language in the polynomial-time hierarchy has an interactive proof system. This technique played a pivotal role in the recent proofs that IP = PSPACE [28] and that MIP = NEXP [4].

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Algebraic methods for interactive proof systems

In recent years the MapReduce framework has emerged as one of the most widely used parallel computing platforms for processing data on terabyte and petabyte scales. Used daily at companies such as Yahoo!, Google, Amazon, and Facebook, and adopted more recently by several universities, it allows for easy parallelization of data intensive computations over many machines. One key feature of MapReduce that differentiates it from previous models of parallel computation is that it interleaves sequential and parallel computation. We propose a model of efficient computation using the MapReduce paradigm. Since MapReduce is designed for computations over massive data sets, our model limits the number of machines and the memory per machine to be substantially sublinear in the size of the input. On the other hand, we place very loose restrictions on the computational power of of any individual machine---our model allows each machine to perform sequential computations in time polynomial in the size of the original input.We compare MapReduce to the PRAM model of computation. We prove a simulation lemma showing that a large class of PRAM algorithms can be efficiently simulated via MapReduce. The strength of MapReduce, however, lies in the fact that it uses both sequential and parallel computation. We demonstrate how algorithms can take advantage of this fact to compute an MST of a dense graph in only two rounds, as opposed to Ω(log(n)) rounds needed in the standard PRAM model. We show how to evaluate a wide class of functions using the MapReduce framework. We conclude by applying this result to show how to compute some basic algorithmic problems such as undirected s-t connectivity in the MapReduce framework.

https://epubs.siam.org/doi/pdf/10.1137/1.9781611973075.76

A model of computation for MapReduce

There are two main algorithmic approaches to sparse signal recovery: geometric and combinatorial. The geometric approach utilizes geometric properties of the measurement matrix Phi. A notable example is the Restricted Isometry Property, which states that the mapping Phi preserves the Euclidean norm of sparse signals; it is known that random dense matrices satisfy this constraint with high probability. On the other hand, the combinatorial approach utilizes sparse matrices, interpreted as adjacency matrices of sparse (possibly random) graphs, and uses combinatorial techniques to recover an approximation to the signal. In this paper we present a unification of these two approaches. To this end, we extend the notion of Restricted Isometry Property from the Euclidean lscr2 norm to the Manhattan lscr1 norm. Then we show that this new lscr1 -based property is essentially equivalent to the combinatorial notion of expansion of the sparse graph underlying the measurement matrix. At the same time we show that the new property suffices to guarantee correctness of both geometric and combinatorial recovery algorithms. As a result, we obtain new measurement matrix constructions and algorithms for signal recovery which, compared to previous algorithms, are superior in either the number of measurements or computational efficiency of decoders.

/pdf/combining-geometry-and-combinatorics-a-unified-approach-to-2l2d5awrpn.pdf

Combining geometry and combinatorics: A unified approach to sparse signal recovery

An algebraic technique for the construction of interactive proof systems is proposed. The technique is used to prove that every language in the polynomial-time hierarchy has an interactive proof system. For the proof, a method is developed for reducing the problem of verifying the value of a low-degree polynomial at two points to verifying the value at one new point. The results have implications for program checking, verification, and self-correction. >

We consider the on-line version of the original m-machine scheduling problem: given m machines and n positive real jobs, schedule the n jobs on the m machines so as to minimize the make span, the completion time of the last job. In the on-line version, as soon as job j arrives, it must be assigned immediately to one of the m machines.We present two main results. The first is a (2–e)-competitive deterministic algorithm for all m. The competitive ratio of all previous algorithms approaches 2 as m→ ∞. Indeed, the problem of improving the competitive ratio for large m had been open since 1966, when the first algorithm for this problem appeared.The second result is an optimal randomized algorithm for the case m = 2. To the best of our knowledge, our 4/3-competitive algorithm is the first specifically randomized algorithm for the original, m-machine, on-line scheduling problem.

Howard Karloff

Papers

Algebraic methods for interactive proof systems

A model of computation for MapReduce

Combining geometry and combinatorics: A unified approach to sparse signal recovery

Algebraic methods for interactive proof systems

New algorithms for an ancient scheduling problem