Title
Reducing a target interval to a few exact queries
Abstract
Many combinatorial problems involving weights can be formulated as a so-called ranged problem. That is, their input consists of a universe U, a (succinctly-represented) set family $\\mathcal{F} \\subseteq 2^{U}$, a weight function ω:U→{1,…,N}, and integers 0≤l≤u≤∞. Then the problem is to decide whether there is an $X \\in \\mathcal{F}$ such that l≤∑e∈Xω(e)≤u. Well-known examples of such problems include Knapsack, Subset Sum, Maximum Matching, and Traveling Salesman. In this paper, we develop a generic method to transform a ranged problem into an exact problem (i.e. a ranged problem for which l=u). We show that our method has several intriguing applications in exact exponential algorithms and parameterized complexity, namely: In exact exponential algorithms, we present new insight into whether Subset Sum and Knapsack have efficient algorithms in both time and space. In particular, we show that the time and space complexity of Subset Sum and Knapsack are equivalent up to a small polynomial factor in the input size. We also give an algorithm that solves sparse instances of Knapsack efficiently in terms of space and time. In parameterized complexity, we present the first kernelization results on weighted variants of several well-known problems. In particular, we show that weighted variants of Vertex Cover and Dominating Set, Traveling Salesman, and Knapsack all admit polynomial randomized Turing kernels when parameterized by |U|. Curiously, our method relies on a technique more commonly found in approximation algorithms.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1007/978-3-642-32589-2_62
MFCS'12 Proceedings of the 37th international conference on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science
Keywords
DocType
Volume
combinatorial problem,weighted variant,space complexity,exact problem,subset sum,target interval,exact exponential algorithm,parameterized complexity,well-known problem,exact query,generic method,input size
Conference
abs/1208.4225
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0302-9743
7
0.48
References 
Authors
14
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jesper Nederlof129424.22
Erik Jan van Leeuwen227525.89
Ruben Van Der Zwaan3244.60