Related papers: Covering and Partitioning Complex Objects with Sma…
Max-cut, clustering, and many other partitioning problems that are of significant importance to machine learning and other scientific fields are NP-hard, a reality that has motivated researchers to develop a wealth of approximation…
The vertex cover problem is one of the most important and intensively studied combinatorial optimization problems. Khot and Regev (2003) proved that the problem is NP-hard to approximate within a factor $2 - \epsilon$, assuming the Unique…
We consider the Bin Packing problem with a partition matroid constraint. The input is a set of items of sizes in $(0,1]$, and a partition matroid over the items. The goal is to pack all items in a minimum number of unit-size bins, such that…
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…
Let $P$ be a crossing-free polygon and $\mathcal C$ a set of shortcuts, where each shortcut is a directed straight-line segment connecting two vertices of $P$. A shortcut hull of $P$ is another crossing-free polygon that encloses $P$ and…
The submodular partitioning problem asks to minimize, over all partitions $P$ of a ground set $V$, the sum of a given submodular function $f$ over the parts of $P$. The problem has seen considerable work in approximability, as it…
We study numerically the cluster structure of random ensembles of two NP-hard optimization problems originating in computational complexity, the vertex-cover problem and the number partitioning problem. We use branch-and-bound type…
A fundamental problem in shape matching and geometric similarity is computing the maximum area overlap between two polygons under translation. For general simple polygons, the best-known algorithm runs in $O((nm)^2 \log(nm))$ time [Mount,…
We study the problem of minimizing a nonnegative separable concave function over a compact feasible set. We approximate this problem to within a factor of 1+epsilon by a piecewise-linear minimization problem over the same feasible set. Our…
The lattice of partitions of a set and its d-divisible generalization have been much studied for their combinatorial, topological, and representation-theoretic properties. An ordered set partition is a set partition where the subsets are…
We are interested in the problem of guarding simple orthogonal polygons with the minimum number of $ r $-guards. The interior point $ p $ belongs an orthogonal polygon $ P $ is visible from $ r $-guard $ g $, if the minimum area rectangle…
We study the family of intersection graphs of low density objects in low dimensional Euclidean space. This family is quite general, and includes planar graphs. We prove that such graphs have small separators. Next, we present efficient…
$\newcommand{\Arr}{\mathcal{A}} \newcommand{\numS}{k} \newcommand{\ArrX}[1]{\Arr(#1)} \newcommand{\eps}{\varepsilon} \newcommand{\opt}{\mathsf{o}}$ For point sets $P_1, \ldots, P_\numS$, a set of lines $L$ is halving if any face of the…
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,…
Let $S$ be a set of $n$ points in $\mathbb{R}^d$. A Steiner convex partition is a tiling of ${\rm conv}(S)$ with empty convex bodies. For every integer $d$, we show that $S$ admits a Steiner convex partition with at most $\lceil…
The problem of finding an optimal vertex cover in a graph is a classic NP-complete problem, and is a special case of the hitting set question. On the other hand, the hitting set problem, when asked in the context of induced geometric…
We introduce the problem of partitioning 2D regions (usually convex regions) into mutually congruent pieces ('tiles').
We consider the Vertex Cover problem in intersection graphs of axis-parallel rectangles on the plane. We present two algorithms: The first is an EPTAS for non-crossing rectangle families, rectangle families $\calR$ where $R_1 \setminus R_2$…
We describe a polynomial time algorithm that takes as input a polygon with axis-parallel sides but irrational vertex coordinates, and outputs a set of as few rectangles as possible into which it can be dissected by axis-parallel cuts and…
A common approach for designing scalable algorithms for massive data sets is to distribute the computation across, say $k$, machines and process the data using limited communication between them. A particularly appealing framework here is…