Related papers: On Approximability of Block Sorting
We are interested in the intersection of approximation algorithms and complexity theory, in particular focusing on the complexity class APX. Informally, APX $\subseteq$ NPO is the complexity class comprising optimization problems where the…
Since the Bin Packing Problem (BPP) is one of the main NP-hard problems, a lot of approximation algorithms have been suggested for it. It has been proven that the best algorithm for BPP has the approximation ratio of 3/2 and the time order…
In this work, we consider a restricted case of the well studied Sorting by Block Interchanges problem. We put an upper bound k on the length of the blocks (substrings) to be interchanged at each step. We call the problem Sorting by k-Block…
In the maximum constraint satisfaction problem (Max CSP), one is given a finite collection of (possibly weighted) constraints on overlapping sets of variables, and the goal is to assign values from a given domain to the variables so as to…
The NP-hard maximum value preordering problem is both a joint relaxation and a hybrid of the clique partition problem (a clustering problem) and the partial ordering problem. Toward approximate solutions and lower bounds, we introduce a…
The Bin Packing Problem is one of the most important optimization problems. In recent years, due to its NP-hard nature, several approximation algorithms have been presented. It is proved that the best algorithm for the Bin Packing Problem…
Center-based clustering has attracted significant research interest from both theory and practice. In many practical applications, input data often contain background knowledge that can be used to improve clustering results. In this work,…
Parameterization and approximation are two popular ways of coping with NP-hard problems. More recently, the two have also been combined to derive many interesting results. We survey developments in the area both from the algorithmic and…
We consider the offline sorting buffer problem. The input is a sequence of items of different types. All items must be processed one by one by a server. The server is equipped with a random-access buffer of limited capacity which can be…
In this paper, we introduce the Maximum Matrix Contraction problem, where we aim to contract as much as possible a binary matrix in order to maximize its density. We study the complexity and the polynomial approximability of the problem.…
The paper considers the NP-hard graph vertex coloring problem, which differs from traditional problems in which it is required to color vertices with a given (or minimal) number of colors so that adjacent vertices have different colors. In…
We study the fair k-set selection problem where we aim to select $k$ sets from a given set system such that the (weighted) occurrence times that each element appears in these $k$ selected sets are balanced, i.e., the maximum (weighted)…
The Bin Packing Problem is one of the most important Combinatorial Optimization problems in optimization and has a lot of real-world applications. Many approximation algorithms have been presented for this problem because of its NP-hard…
A canonical feature of the constraint satisfaction problems in NP is approximation hardness, where in the worst case, finding sufficient-quality approximate solutions is exponentially hard for all known methods. Fundamentally, the lack of…
We consider a memory allocation problem that can be modeled as a version of bin packing where items may be split, but each bin may contain at most two (parts of) items. A 3/2-approximation algorithm and an NP-hardness proof for this problem…
For any $\varepsilon > 0$, we prove that $k$-Dimensional Matching is hard to approximate within a factor of $k/(12 + \varepsilon)$ for large $k$ unless $\textsf{NP} \subseteq \textsf{BPP}$. Listed in Karp's 21 $\textsf{NP}$-complete…
We survey results on the hardness of approximating combinatorial optimization problems.
We prove that the Bounded Occurrence Ordering k-CSP Problem is not approximation resistant. We give a very simple local search algorithm that always performs better than the random assignment algorithm. Specifically, the expected value of…
In the maximum constraint satisfaction problem (MAX CSP), one is given a finite collection of (possibly weighted) constraints on overlapping sets of variables, and the goal is to assign values from a given finite domain to the variables so…
Co-clustering, that is, partitioning a numerical matrix into homogeneous submatrices, has many applications ranging from bioinformatics to election analysis. Many interesting variants of co-clustering are NP-hard. We focus on the basic…