Related papers: Hardness of approximation for strip packing
The problem of finding longest common subsequence (LCS) is one of the fundamental problems in computer science, which finds application in fields such as computational biology, text processing, information retrieval, data compression etc.…
Motivated by applications in production planning and storage allocation in hierarchical databases, we initiate the study of covering partially ordered items (CPO). Given a capacity $k \in \mathbb{Z}^+$, and a directed graph $G=(V,E)$ where…
The automaton constrained tree knapsack problem is a variant of the knapsack problem in which the items are associated with the vertices of the tree, and we can select a subset of items that is accepted by a top-down tree automaton. If the…
Despite much research, hard weighted problems still resist super-polynomial improvements over their textbook solution. On the other hand, the unweighted versions of these problems have recently witnessed the sought-after speedups.…
We study the max-min fair allocation problem in which a set of $m$ indivisible items are to be distributed among $n$ agents such that the minimum utility among all agents is maximized. In the restricted setting, the utility of each item $j$…
The Unbounded Knapsack Problem (UKP) is a well-known variant of the famous 0-1 Knapsack Problem (0-1 KP). In contrast to 0-1 KP, an arbitrary number of copies of every item can be taken in UKP. Since UKP is NP-hard, fully polynomial time…
Finding locally optimal solutions for max-cut and max-$k$-cut are well-known PLS-complete problems. An instinctive approach to finding such a locally optimum solution is the FLIP method. Even though FLIP requires exponential time in…
In the Max-k-diameter problem, we are given a set of points in a metric space, and the goal is to partition the input points into k parts such that the maximum pairwise distance between points in the same part of the partition is minimized.…
We study the efficient approximability of basic graph and logic problems in the literature when instances are specified hierarchically as in \cite{Le89} or are specified by 1-dimensional finite narrow periodic specifications as in…
We present the first near optimal approximation schemes for the maximum weighted (uncapacitated or capacitated) $b$--matching problems for non-bipartite graphs that run in time (near) linear in the number of edges. For any…
We give a comprehensive study of bin packing with conflicts (BPC). The input is a set $I$ of items, sizes $s:I \rightarrow [0,1]$, and a conflict graph $G = (I,E)$. The goal is to find a partition of $I$ into a minimum number of independent…
Sparse linear regression is the well-studied inference problem where one is given a design matrix $\mathbf{A} \in \mathbb{R}^{M\times N}$ and a response vector $\mathbf{b} \in \mathbb{R}^M$, and the goal is to find a solution $\mathbf{x}…
An NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem $\Pi$ is said to have an {\em approximation threshold} if there is some $t$ such that the optimal value of $\Pi$ can be approximated in polynomial time within a ratio of $t$, and it is NP-hard…
Packing and covering linear programs (PC-LPs) form an important class of linear programs (LPs) across computer science, operations research, and optimization. In 1993, Luby and Nisan constructed an iterative algorithm for approximately…
Binary quadratic programming problems have attracted much attention in the last few decades due to their potential applications. This type of problems are NP-hard in general, and still considered a challenge in the design of efficient…
We study the computational complexity of approximating general constrained Markov decision processes. Our primary contribution is the design of a polynomial time $(0,\epsilon)$-additive bicriteria approximation algorithm for finding optimal…
We give an $\alpha(1+\epsilon)$-approximation algorithm for solving covering LPs, assuming the presence of a $(1/\alpha)$-approximation algorithm for a certain optimization problem. Our algorithm is based on a simple modification of the…
$\delta$-Covering, for some covering range $\delta>0$, is a continuous facility location problem on undirected graphs where all edges have unit length. The facilities may be positioned on the vertices as well as on the interior of the…
Given an edge-weighted metric complete graph with $n$ vertices, the maximum weight metric triangle packing problem is to find a set of $n/3$ vertex-disjoint triangles with the total weight of all triangles in the packing maximized. Several…
Given an edge-weighted (metric/general) complete graph with $n$ vertices, the maximum weight (metric/general) $k$-cycle/path packing problem is to find a set of $\frac{n}{k}$ vertex-disjoint $k$-cycles/paths such that the total weight is…