Related papers: The bright side of simple heuristics for the TSP
We show that if P$\neq$NP, then a wide class of TSP heuristics fail to approximate the length of the TSP to asymptotic optimality, even for random Euclidean instances. Previously, this result was not even known for any heuristics (greedy,…
In the Euclidean $k$-traveling salesman problem ($k$-TSP), we are given $n$ points in the $d$-dimensional Euclidean space, for some fixed constant $d\geq 2$, and a positive integer $k$. The goal is to find a shortest tour visiting at least…
In the Euclidean TSP with neighborhoods (TSPN), we are given a collection of n regions (neighborhoods) and we seek a shortest tour that visits each region. As a generalization of the classical Euclidean TSP, TSPN is also NP-hard. In this…
We study the variant of the Euclidean Traveling Salesman problem where instead of a set of points, we are given a set of lines as input, and the goal is to find the shortest tour that visits each line. The best known upper and lower bounds…
The seminar assignment problem is a variant of the generalized assignment problem in which items have unit size and the amount of space allowed in each bin is restricted to an arbitrary set of values. The problem has been shown to be…
We revisit the classic task of finding the shortest tour of $n$ points in $d$-dimensional Euclidean space, for any fixed constant $d \geq 2$. We determine the optimal dependence on $\varepsilon$ in the running time of an algorithm that…
We revisit the traveling salesman problem with neighborhoods (TSPN) and propose several new approximation algorithms. These constitute either first approximations (for hyperplanes, lines, and balls in $\mathbb{R}^d$, for $d\geq 3$) or…
Finding a d-regular spanning subgraph (or d-factor) of a graph is easy by Tutte's reduction to the matching problem. By the same reduction, it is easy to find a minimal or maximal d-factor of a graph. However, if we require that the…
We show new applications of the nearest-neighbor chain algorithm, a technique that originated in agglomerative hierarchical clustering. We apply it to a diverse class of geometric problems: we construct the greedy multi-fragment tour for…
The traveling salesman problem (TSP) consists of finding the length of the shortest closed tour visiting N ``cities''. We consider the Euclidean TSP where the cities are distributed randomly and independently in a d-dimensional unit…
$\newcommand{\eps}{\varepsilon}$ In this paper, we consider two important problems defined on finite metric spaces, and provide efficient new algorithms and approximation schemes for these problems on inputs given as graph shortest path…
We are studying $d$-dimensional geometric problems that have algorithms with $1-1/d$ appearing in the exponent of the running time, for example, in the form of $2^{n^{1-1/d}}$ or $n^{k^{1-1/d}}$. This means that these algorithms perform…
Probabilistic analysis for metric optimization problems has mostly been conducted on random Euclidean instances, but little is known about metric instances drawn from distributions other than the Euclidean. This motivates our study of…
We study the problem of finding a tour of $n$ points in which every edge is long. More precisely, we wish to find a tour that visits every point exactly once, maximizing the length of the shortest edge in the tour. The problem is known as…
With applications to many disciplines, the traveling salesman problem (TSP) is a classical computer science optimization problem with applications to industrial engineering, theoretical computer science, bioinformatics, and several other…
Simple heuristics often show a remarkable performance in practice for optimization problems. Worst-case analysis often falls short of explaining this performance. Because of this, "beyond worst-case analysis" of algorithms has recently…
In the Euclidean TSP with neighborhoods (TSPN), we are given a collection of $n$ regions (neighborhoods) and we seek a shortest tour that visits each region. In the path variant, we seek a shortest path that visits each region. We present…
Let $P$ be a set of points in $\mathbb{R}^d$, and let $\alpha \ge 1$ be a real number. We define the distance between two points $p,q\in P$ as $|pq|^{\alpha}$, where $|pq|$ denotes the standard Euclidean distance between $p$ and $q$. We…
For an ordered point set in a Euclidean space or, more generally, in an abstract metric space, the ordered Nearest Neighbor Graph is obtained by connecting each of the points to its closest predecessor by a directed edge. We show that for…
We take a first step towards a rigorous asymptotic analysis of graph-based approaches for finding (approximate) nearest neighbors in high-dimensional spaces, by analyzing the complexity of (randomized) greedy walks on the approximate near…