Related papers: Approximation algorithms for nonbinary agreement f…
We study approximation algorithms for the forest cover and bounded forest cover problems. A probabilistic $2+\epsilon$ approximation algorithm for the forest cover problem is given using the method of dual fitting. A deterministic algorithm…
We introduce and investigate the approximability of the maximum binary tree problem (MBT) in directed and undirected graphs. The goal in MBT is to find a maximum-sized binary tree in a given graph. MBT is a natural variant of the…
A phylogenetic tree is a graphical representation of an evolutionary history of taxa in which the leaves correspond to the taxa and the non-leaves correspond to speciations. One of important problems in phylogenetic analysis is to assemble…
We consider the following generalization of binary search in sorted arrays to tree domains. In each step of the search, an algorithm is querying a vertex $q$, and as a reply, it receives an answer, which either states that $q$ is the…
In this work we study the interleaving distance between merge trees from a combinatorial point of view. We use a particular type of matching between trees to obtain a novel formulation of the distance. With such formulation, we tackle the…
Understanding the evolution of a set of genes or species is a fundamental problem in evolutionary biology. The problem we study here takes as input a set of trees describing {possibly discordant} evolutionary scenarios for a given set of…
Finding a minimum spanning tree (MST) for $n$ points in an arbitrary metric space is a fundamental primitive for hierarchical clustering and many other ML tasks, but this takes $\Omega(n^2)$ time to even approximate. We introduce a…
Random Forests (RF) and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) are two of the most widely used and highly performing classification and regression models. They aggregate equally weighted CART trees, generated randomly in RF or sequentially in…
Maximum parsimony distance is a measure used to quantify the dissimilarity of two unrooted phylogenetic trees. It is NP-hard to compute, and very few positive algorithmic results are known due to its complex combinatorial structure. Here we…
The computational complexity of the isomorphism problem for regular trees, regular linear orders, and regular words is analyzed. A tree is regular if it is isomorphic to the prefix order on a regular language. In case regular languages are…
Given a set $X$ of species, a phylogenetic tree is an unrooted binary tree whose leaves are bijectively labelled by $X$. Such trees can be used to show the way species evolve over time. One way of understanding how topologically different…
We study the natural problem of Triplet Reconstruction (also Rooted Triplets Consistency or Triplet Clustering), originally motivated in computational biology and relational databases (Aho, Sagiv, Szymanski, and Ullman, 1981): given $n$…
We present four novel approximation algorithms for finding triangulation of minimum treewidth. Two of the algorithms improve on the running times of algorithms by Robertson and Seymour, and Becker and Geiger that approximate the optimum by…
In this paper we investigate an extremal problem on binary phylogenetic trees. Given two such trees $T_1$ and $T_2$, both with leaf-set ${1,2,...,n}$, we are interested in the size of the largest subset $S \subseteq {1,2,...,n}$ of leaves…
We present a simple $O(n^4)$-time algorithm for computing optimal search trees with two-way comparisons. The only previous solution to this problem, by Anderson et al., has the same running time, but is significantly more complicated and is…
Binary jumbled pattern matching asks to preprocess a binary string $S$ in order to answer queries $(i,j)$ which ask for a substring of $S$ that is of length $i$ and has exactly $j$ 1-bits. This problem naturally generalizes to…
In this paper we propose and study a new complexity model for approximation algorithms. The main motivation are practical problems over large data sets that need to be solved many times for different scenarios, e.g., many multicast trees…
For an $m$-edge connected simple graph $G$, finding a spanning tree of $G$ with the maximum number of leaves is MAXSNP-complete. The problem remains NP-complete even if $G$ is planar and the maximal degree of $G$ is at most four. Lu and…
We present a class of linear programming approximations for constrained optimization problems. In the case of mixed-integer polynomial optimization problems, if the intersection graph of the constraints has bounded tree-width our…
Approximation algorithms for the prize-collecting Steiner forest problem (PCSF) have been a subject of research for over three decades, starting with the seminal works of Agrawal, Klein, and Ravi and Goemans and Williamson on Steiner forest…