Related papers: Lower bounds for approximation schemes for Closest…
Set Cover is a classic NP-hard problem; as shown by Slav\'{i}k (1997) the greedy algorithm gives an approximation ratio of $\ln n - \ln \ln n + \Theta(1)$. A series of works by Lund \& Yannakakis (1994), Feige (1998), Moshkovitz (2015) have…
We give an approximation algorithm for packing and covering linear programs (linear programs with non-negative coefficients). Given a constraint matrix with n non-zeros, r rows, and c columns, the algorithm computes feasible primal and dual…
This paper addresses the problem of finding a B-term wavelet representation of a given discrete function $f \in \real^n$ whose distance from f is minimized. The problem is well understood when we seek to minimize the Euclidean distance…
We address the classical knapsack problem and a variant in which an upper bound is imposed on the number of items that can be selected. We show that appropriate combinations of rounding techniques yield novel and powerful ways of rounding.…
We provide a new approach for establishing hardness of approximation results, based on the theory recently introduced by the author. It allows one to directly show that approximating a problem beyond a certain threshold requires…
We study approximation algorithms for the following three string measures that are widely used in practice: edit distance (ED), longest common subsequence (LCS), and longest increasing sequence (LIS). All three problems can be solved…
Given an LZW/LZ78 compressed text, we want to find an approximate occurrence of a given pattern of length m. The goal is to achieve time complexity depending on the size n of the compressed representation of the text instead of its length.…
Given an approximation algorithm $A$, we want to find the input with the worst approximation ratio, i.e., the input for which $A$'s output's objective value is the worst possible compared to the optimal solution's objective value. Such hard…
Makespan scheduling on identical machines is one of the most basic and fundamental packing problems studied in the discrete optimization literature. It asks for an assignment of $n$ jobs to a set of $m$ identical machines that minimizes the…
We consider the following geometric optimization problem: Given $ n $ axis-aligned rectangles in the plane, the goal is to find a set of horizontal segments of minimum total length such that each rectangle is stabbed. A segment stabs a…
We study the hardness of approximation of clause minimum and literal minimum representations of pure Horn functions in $n$ Boolean variables. We show that unless P=NP, it is not possible to approximate in polynomial time the minimum number…
Scheduling on related machines ($Q||C_{\max}$) is one of the most important problems in the field of Algorithmic Mechanism Design. Each machine is controlled by a selfish agent and her valuation can be expressed via a single parameter, her…
In the Strip Packing problem (SP), we are given a vertical half-strip $[0,W]\times[0,\infty)$ and a set of $n$ axis-aligned rectangles of width at most $W$. The goal is to find a non-overlapping packing of all rectangles into the strip such…
We study the budgeted versions of the well known matching and matroid intersection problems. While both problems admit a polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS) [Berger et al. (Math. Programming, 2011), Chekuri, Vondrak and Zenklusen…
In the Shortest Common Superstring problem (SCS), one needs to find the shortest superstring for a set of strings. While SCS is NP-hard and MAX-SNP-hard, the Greedy Algorithm "choose two strings with the largest overlap; merge them; repeat"…
It has long been known, since the classical work of (Arora, Karger, Karpinski, JCSS~99), that \MC\ admits a PTAS on dense graphs, and more generally, \kCSP\ admits a PTAS on "dense" instances with $\Omega(n^k)$ constraints. In this paper we…
We give a deterministic polynomial-time approximation scheme (FPTAS) for the volume of the truncated fractional matching polytope for graphs of maximum degree $\Delta$, where the truncation is by restricting each variable to the interval…
In this paper we study a scheduling problem arising from executing numerical simulations on HPC architectures. With a constant number of parallel machines, the objective is to minimize the makespan under memory constraints for the machines.…
Approximate string matching is the problem of finding all factors of a text t of length n that are at a distance at most k from a pattern x of length m. Approximate circular string matching is the problem of finding all factors of t that…
Given $n$ independent random variables $X_1, X_2, ..., X_n$ and an integer $C$, we study the fundamental problem of computing the probability that the sum $X=X_1+X_2+...+X_n$ is at most $C$. We assume that each random variable $X_i$ is…