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Edit distances between merge trees of scalar fields have many applications in scientific visualization, such as ensemble analysis, feature tracking or symmetry detection. In this paper, we propose branch mappings, a novel approach to the…
We develop and analyze methods for computing provably optimal {\em maximum a posteriori} (MAP) configurations for a subclass of Markov random fields defined on graphs with cycles. By decomposing the original distribution into a convex…
Phylogenetic networks extend phylogenetic trees to model non-vertical inheritance, by which a lineage inherits material from multiple parents. The computational complexity of estimating phylogenetic networks from genome-wide data with…
Optimal Morse matchings reveal essential structures of cell complexes which lead to powerful tools to study discrete geometrical objects, in particular discrete 3-manifolds. However, such matchings are known to be NP-hard to compute on…
We present approximation algorithms for the following NP-hard optimization problems related to bottleneck spanning trees in metric spaces. 1. The disjoint bottleneck spanning tree problem: Given $n$ pairs of points in a metric space, find…
Sparse shortcuttings of trees -- equivalently, sparse 1-spanners for tree metrics with bounded hop-diameter -- have been studied extensively (under different names and settings), since the pioneering works of [Yao82, Cha87, AS87, BTS94],…
This paper give a simple linear-time algorithm that, given a weighted digraph, finds a spanning tree that simultaneously approximates a shortest-path tree and a minimum spanning tree. The algorithm provides a continuous trade-off: given the…
Computing the edit distance of two strings is one of the most basic problems in computer science and combinatorial optimization. Tree edit distance is a natural generalization of edit distance in which the task is to compute a measure of…
This paper investigates the a-posteriori analysis of Branch-and-Bound~(BB) trees to extract structural information about the feasible region of mixed-binary linear programs. We introduce three novel outer approximations of the feasible…
The early development of a zygote can be mathematically described by a developmental tree. To compare developmental trees of different species, we need to define distances on trees. If children cells after a division are not…
The Maximum Agreement Forest (Maf) problem is a well-studied problem in evolutionary biology, which asks for a largest common subforest of a given collection of phylogenetic trees with identical leaf label-set. However, the previous work…
We consider the minimum spanning tree (MST) problem under the restriction that for every vertex v, the edges of the tree that are adjacent to v satisfy a given family of constraints. A famous example thereof is the classical…
In the $L_0$ Fitting Tree Metrics problem, we are given all pairwise distances among the elements of a set $V$ and our output is a tree metric on $V$. The goal is to minimize the number of pairwise distance disagreements between the input…
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…
We consider the numerical taxonomy problem of fitting a positive distance function ${D:{S\choose 2}\rightarrow \mathbb R_{>0}}$ by a tree metric. We want a tree $T$ with positive edge weights and including $S$ among the vertices so that…
The maximum common subtree isomorphism problem asks for the largest possible isomorphism between subtrees of two given input trees. This problem is a natural restriction of the maximum common subgraph problem, which is ${\sf NP}$-hard in…
In this paper we consider the problem of computing an mRNA sequence of maximal similarity for a given mRNA of secondary structure constraints, introduced by Backofen et al. in [BNS02] denoted as the MRSO problem. The problem is known to be…
Computing the similarity between two data points plays a vital role in many machine learning algorithms. Metric learning has the aim of learning a good metric automatically from data. Most existing studies on metric learning for…
Many recent approximation algorithms for different variants of the traveling salesman problem (asymmetric TSP, graph TSP, s-t-path TSP) exploit the well-known fact that a solution of the natural linear programming relaxation can be written…
The Polyline Bundle Simplification (PBS) problem is a generalization of the classical polyline simplification problem. Given a set of polylines, which may share line segments and points, PBS asks for the smallest consistent simplification…