Related papers: Lower bounds for approximation schemes for Closest…
We provide a general framework for getting expected linear time constant factor approximations (and in many cases FPTASs) to several well-known problems in Computational Geometry, such as $k$-center clustering and farthest nearest neighbor.…
Exact pattern matching in labeled graphs is the problem of searching paths of a graph $G=(V,E)$ that spell the same string as the pattern $P[1..m]$. This basic problem can be found at the heart of more complex operations on variation graphs…
We present approximation algorithms for maximum independent set of pseudo-disks in the plane, both in the weighted and unweighted cases. For the unweighted case, we prove that a local search algorithm yields a \PTAS. For the weighted case,…
Real-world data often comes in compressed form. Analyzing compressed data directly (without decompressing it) can save space and time by orders of magnitude. In this work, we focus on fundamental sequence comparison problems and try to…
The Median String Problem is W[1]-Hard under the Levenshtein distance, thus, approximation heuristics are used. Perturbation-based heuristics have been proved to be very competitive as regards the ratio approximation accuracy/convergence…
The data broadcast problem is to find a schedule for broadcasting a given set of messages over multiple channels. The goal is to minimize the cost of the broadcast plus the expected response time to clients who periodically and…
In the Maximum Duo-Preservation String Mapping problem we are given two strings and wish to map the letters of the former to the letters of the latter so as to maximise the number of duos. A duo is a pair of consecutive letters that is…
A weighted string, also known as a position weight matrix, is a sequence of probability distributions over some alphabet. We revisit the Weighted Shortest Common Supersequence (WSCS) problem, introduced by Amir et al. [SPIRE 2011], that is,…
The sum of radii problem ($k$-MSR) asks, given a metric space on $n$ points, to place $k$ balls covering all points so as to minimize the sum of their radii. Despite extensive study from the perspectives of approximation and parameterized…
We raise the question of approximating the compressibility of a string with respect to a fixed compression scheme, in sublinear time. We study this question in detail for two popular lossless compression schemes: run-length encoding (RLE)…
We consider the classic Facility Location problem on planar graphs (non-uniform, uncapacitated). Given an edge-weighted planar graph $G$, a set of clients $C\subseteq V(G)$, a set of facilities $F\subseteq V(G)$, and opening costs…
We study the knapsack problem with graph theoretic constraints. That is, we assume that there exists a graph structure on the set of items of knapsack and the solution also needs to satisfy certain graph theoretic properties on top of…
Various new scheduling problems have been arising from practical production processes and spawning new research areas in the scheduling field. We study the parallel multi-stage open shops problem, which generalizes the classic open shop…
The AC Optimal power flow (OPF) problem is one of the most fundamental problems in power systems engineering. For the past decades, researchers have been relying on unproven heuristics to tackle OPF. The hardness of OPF stems from two…
We give the first polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS) for the stochastic load balancing problem when the job sizes follow Poisson distributions. This improves upon the 2-approximation algorithm due to Goel and Indyk (FOCS'99).…
The existence of string functions, which are not polynomial time computable, but whose graph is checkable in polynomial time, is a basic assumption in cryptography. We prove that in the framework of algebraic complexity, there are no such…
Assigning jobs onto identical machines with the objective to minimize the maximal load is one of the most basic problems in combinatorial optimization. Motivated by product planing and data placement, we study a natural extension called…
We consider the approximate pattern matching problem under edit distance. In this problem we are given a pattern $P$ of length $w$ and a text $T$ of length $n$ over some alphabet $\Sigma$, and a positive integer $k$. The goal is to find all…
We prove that for an arbitrarily small constant $\eps>0,$ assuming NP$\not \subseteq$DTIME$(2^{{\log^{O(1/\eps)} n}})$, the preprocessing versions of the closest vector problem and the nearest codeword problem are hard to approximate within…
If a two-player social welfare maximization problem does not admit a PTAS, we prove that any maximal-in-range truthful mechanism that runs in polynomial time cannot achieve an approximation factor better than 1/2. Moreover, for the k-player…