Approximating the balanced minimum evolution problem

We prove a strong inapproximability result for the Balanced Minimum Evolution Problem. Our proof also implies that the problem remains NP-hard even when restricted to metric instances. Furthermore, we give a MST-based 2-approximation algorithm for the problem for such instances.     

Inverse problem of minimum cuts

Given a networkN = (V,A,c), a sources V, a. sinkt V and somes —t cuts and suppose each element of the capacity vectorc can be changed with a cost proportional to the changes, the inverse problem of minimum cuts we study here is to change the original capacities with the least total cost under restrictions on the changes of the capacities, so that all thoses —t cuts become minimum cuts with respect to the new capacities.In this paper we shall show that the inverse problem of minimum cuts can be directly transformed into a minimum cost circulation problem and therefore can be solved efficiently by strongly polynomial algorithms.The author is grateful to the partial support of the Universities Grant Council of Hong Kong under the grant CITYU #9040189Work partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China     

Symmetry of cuts in fields of formal power series

The theory of cuts is an effective tool for studying ordered fields. We continue research into the relationship between the structure of cuts in a field of formal power series and algebraic properties of the field. __________ Translated from Algebra i Logika, Vol. 47, No. 2, pp. 174–185, March–April, 2008.     

An information theory perspective on the balanced minimum evolution problem

We show that the Balanced Minimum Evolution Problem (BMEP) is a cross-entropy minimization problem. This new perspective both extends the previous interpretations of the BMEP length function described in the literature and enables the identification of an efficiently computable family of lower bounds on the value of the optimal solution to the problem.     

Scheduling with a minimum number of machines

We investigate the scheduling problem with release dates and deadlines on a minimum number of machines. In the case of equal release dates, we present a 2-approximation algorithm. We also show that Greedy Best-Fit (GBF) is a 6-approximation algorithm for the case of equal processing times.     

The balanced minimum evolution problem under uncertain data

We investigate the Robust Deviation Balanced Minimum Evolution Problem (RDBMEP), a combinatorial optimization problem that arises in computational biology when the evolutionary distances from taxa are uncertain and varying inside intervals. By exploiting some fundamental properties of the objective function, we present a mixed integer programming model to exactly solve instances of the RDBMEP and discuss the biological impact of uncertainty on the solutions to the problem. Our results give perspective on the mathematics of the RDBMEP and suggest new directions to tackle phylogeny estimation problems affected by uncertainty.     

Hierarchies of Partially Ordered Connectives and Quantifiers

Connections between partially ordered connectives and Henkin quantifiers are considered. It is proved that the logic with all partially ordered connectives and the logic with all Henkin quantifiers coincide. This implies that the hierarchy of partially ordered connectives is strongly hierarchical and gives several nondefinability results between some of them. It is also deduced that each Henkin quantifier can be defined by a quantifier of the form what is a strengthening of the Walkoe result. MSC: 03C80.     

On finding the K best cuts in a network

We show that the O(K · n⁴) algorithm of Hamacher (1982) for finding the K best cut-sets fails because it may produce cuts rather than cut-sets. With the convention that two cuts $\text{(X,}\text{X}\text{)}$ and $\text{(Y,}\text{Y}\text{)}$ are different whenever X ≠ Y the K best cut problem can be solved in O(K · n⁴).     

Approximation algorithms for the minimum rainbow subgraph problem

We consider the minimum rainbow subgraph problem (MRS): given a graph G, whose edges are coloured with p colours. Find a subgraph F⊆G of G of minimum order and with p edges such that each colour occurs exactly once. For graphs with maximum degree Δ(G) there is a greedy polynomial-time approximation algorithm for the MRS problem with an approximation ratio of Δ(G). In this paper we present a polynomial-time approximation algorithm with an approximation ratio of for Δ≥2.     

A note on the minimum bounded edge-partition of a tree

Minimum bounded edge-partition divides the edge set of a tree into the minimum number of disjoint connected components given a maximum weight for any component. It is an adaptation of the uniform edge-partition of a tree. An optimization algorithm is developed for this NP-hard problem, based on repeated bin packing of inter-related instances. The algorithm has linear running time for the class of ‘balanced trees’ common for the stochastic programming application which motivated investigation of this problem.Fast 2-approximation algorithms are formed for general instances by replacing the optimal bin packing with almost any bin packing heuristic. The asymptotic worst-case ratio of these approximation algorithms is never better than the absolute worst-case ratio of the bin packing heuristic used.     

Implementing an efficient minimum capacity cut algorithm

In this paper, we present an efficient implementation of theO(mn + n ² logn) time algorithm originally proposed by Nagamochi and Ibaraki (1992) for computing the minimum capacity cut of an undirected network. To enhance computation, various ideas are added so that it can contract as many edges as possible in each iteration. To evaluate the performance of the resulting implementation, we conducted extensive computational experiments, and compared the results with that of Padberg and Rinaldi's algorithm (1990), which is currently known as one of the practically fastest programs for this problem. The results indicate that our program is considerably faster than Padberg and Rinaldi's program, and its running time is not significantly affected by the types of the networks being solved.Corresponding author.     

Degree-bounded minimum spanning trees

Given n points in the Euclidean plane, the degree-δ minimum spanning tree (MST) problem asks for a spanning tree of minimum weight in which the degree of each vertex is at most δ. The problem is NP-hard for 2≤δ≤3, while the NP-hardness of the problem is open for δ=4. The problem is polynomial-time solvable when δ=5. By presenting an improved approximation analysis for Chan’s degree-4 MST algorithm [T. Chan, Euclidean bounded-degree spanning tree ratios, Discrete & Computational Geometry 32 (2004) 177-194], we show that, for any arbitrary collection of points in the Euclidean plane, there always exists a degree-4 spanning tree of weight at most times the weight of an MST.     

A note on balanced bipartitions

A balanced bipartition of a graph G is a bipartition V₁ and V₂ of V(G) such that −1≤|V₁|−|V₂|≤1. Bollobás and Scott conjectured that if G is a graph with m edges and minimum degree at least 2 then G admits a balanced bipartition V₁,V₂ such that max{e(V₁),e(V₂)}≤m/3, where e(V_i) denotes the number of edges of G with both ends in V_i. In this note, we prove this conjecture for graphs with average degree at least 6 or with minimum degree at least 5. Moreover, we show that if G is a graph with m edges and n vertices, and if the maximum degree Δ(G)=o(n) or the minimum degree δ(G)→∞, then G admits a balanced bipartition V₁,V₂ such that max{e(V₁),e(V₂)}≤(1+o(1))m/4, answering a question of Bollobás and Scott in the affirmative. We also provide a sharp lower bound on max{e(V₁,V₂):V₁,V₂ is a balanced bipartition of G}, in terms of size of a maximum matching, where e(V₁,V₂) denotes the number of edges between V₁ and V₂.     

Greedy metric minimum online matchings with random arrivals

We consider online metric minimum bipartite matching problems with random arrival order and show that the greedy algorithm assigning each request to the nearest unmatched server is $n$-competitive, where $n$ is the number of requests. This result is complemented by a lower bound exhibiting that the greedy algorithm has a competitive ratio of at least $n^{(ln3?ln2)∕ln4}\approx n^{0.292}$, even when the underlying metric space is the real line.     

Searching monotone multi-dimensional arrays

A d-dimensional array of real numbers is called monotone increasing if its entries are increasing along each dimension. Given A_n,d, a monotone increasing d-dimensional array with n entries along each dimension, and a real number x, we want to decide whether x∈A_n,d, by performing a sequence of comparisons between x and some entries of A_n,d. We want to minimize the number of comparisons used. In this paper we investigate this search problem, we generalize Linial and Saks’ search algorithm [N. Linial, M. Saks, Searching ordered structures, J. Algorithms 6 (1985) 86-103] for monotone three-dimensional arrays to d-dimensions for d?4. For d=4, our new algorithm is optimal up to the lower order terms.     

The minimum Manhattan network problem: Approximations and exact solutions

Given a set of points in the plane and a constant t1, a Euclidean t-spanner is a network in which, for any pair of points, the ratio of the network distance and the Euclidean distance of the two points is at most t. Such networks have applications in transportation or communication network design and have been studied extensively.

In this paper we study 1-spanners under the Manhattan (or L₁-) metric. Such networks are called Manhattan networks. A Manhattan network for a set of points is a set of axis-parallel line segments whose union contains an x- and y-monotone path for each pair of points. It is not known whether it is NP-hard to compute minimum Manhattan networks (MMN), i.e., Manhattan networks of minimum total length. In this paper we present an approximation algorithm for this problem. Given a set P of n points, our algorithm computes in O(nlogn) time and linear space a Manhattan network for P whose length is at most 3 times the length of an MMN of P.

We also establish a mixed-integer programming formulation for the MMN problem. With its help we extensively investigate the performance of our factor-3 approximation algorithm on random point sets.     

Bi-cycle extendable through a given set in balanced bipartite graphs

Let G=(X,Y;E) be a balanced bipartite graph of order 2n. The path-cover numberpc(H) of a graph H is the minimum number of vertex-disjoint paths that use up all the vertices of H. S⊆V(G) is called a balanced set of G if |S∩X|=|S∩Y|. In this paper, we will give some sufficient conditions for a balanced bipartite graph G satisfying that for every balanced set S, there is a bi-cycle of every length from |S|+2pc(〈S〉) up to 2n through S.     

Maximum directed cuts in digraphs with degree restriction

For integers m, k≥1, we investigate the maximum size of a directed cut in directed graphs in which there are m edges and each vertex has either indegree at most k or outdegree at most k. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Graph Theory     

Homomorphism-Homogeneous Partially Ordered Sets

A structure is called homogeneous if every isomorphism between finite substructures of the structure extends to an automorphism of the structure. Recently, P. J. Cameron and J. Nešetřil introduced a relaxed version of homogeneity: we say that a structure is homomorphism-homogeneous if every homomorphism between finite substructures of the structure extends to an endomorphism of the structure. In this paper we characterize homomorphism-homogeneous partially ordered sets (where a homomorphism between partially ordered sets A and B is a mapping f : A →B satisfying ). We show that there are five types of homomorphism-homogeneous partially ordered sets: partially ordered sets whose connected components are chains; trees; dual trees; partially ordered sets which split into a tree and a dual tree; and X ₅-dense locally bounded partially ordered sets. Supported by the Ministry od Science and Environmental Protection of the Republic of Serbia, Grant No. 144017.     

Balanced Cayley graphs and balanced planar graphs

A balanced graph is a bipartite graph with no induced circuit of length . These graphs arise in integer linear programming. We focus on graph-algebraic properties of balanced graphs to prove a complete classification of balanced Cayley graphs on abelian groups. Moreover, in this paper, we prove that there is no cubic balanced planar graph. Finally, some remarkable conjectures for balanced regular graphs are also presented. The graphs in this paper are simple.