Min-$k$-cut is the problem of partitioning vertices of a given graph or hypergraph into $k$ subsets such that the total weight of edges or hyperedges crossing different subsets is minimized. For the capacitated min-$k$-cut problem, each edge has a non-negative weight, and each subset has a possibly different capacity that imposes an upper bound on … Read more
Given a directed graph $G$ with non negative cost on the arcs, a directed tree cover of $G$ is a directed tree such that either head or tail (or both of them) of every arc in $G$ is touched by $T$. The minimum directed tree cover problem (DTCP) is to find a directed tree cover … Read more
We study the version of the asymmetric prize collecting traveling salesman problem, where the objective is to find a directed tour that visits a subset of vertices such that the length of the tour plus the sum of penalties associated with vertices not in the tour is as small as possible. In \cite{Amico}, the authors … Read more
Given a positive integer n and a positive semidefinite matrix A = (A_{ij}) of size m x m, the positive semidefinite Grothendieck problem with rank-n-constraint is (SDP_n) maximize \sum_{i=1}^m \sum_{j=1}^m A_{ij} x_i \cdot x_j, where x_1, …, x_m \in S^{n-1}. In this paper we design a polynomial time approximation algorithm for SDP_n achieving an approximation … Read more
In this paper we define semidefinite packing programs and describe an algorithm to approximately solve these problems. Semidefinite packing programs arise in many applications such as semidefinite programming relaxations for combinatorial optimization problems, sparse principal component analysis, and sparse variance unfolding technique for dimension reduction. Our algorithm exploits the structural similarity between semidefinite packing programs … Read more
We present a simple, first-order approximation algorithm for the support vector classification problem. Given a pair of linearly separable data sets and $\epsilon \in (0,1)$, the proposed algorithm computes a separating hyperplane whose margin is within a factor of $(1-\epsilon)$ of that of the maximum-margin separating hyperplane. We discuss how our algorithm can be extended … Read more
We study minimizing the sum of weighted completion times in a concurrent open shop. We give a primal-dual 2-approximation algorithm for this problem. We also show that several natural linear programming relaxations for this problem have an integrality gap of 2. Finally, we show that this problem is inapproximable within a factor strictly less than … Read more
Submodular function maximization is a central problem in combinatorial optimization, generalizing many important problems including Max Cut in directed/undirected graphs and in hypergraphs, certain constraint satisfaction problems, maximum entropy sampling, and maximum facility location problems. Unlike submodular minimization, submodular maximization is NP-hard. In this paper, we give the first constant-factor approximation algorithm for maximizing any … Read more
Given $\cA := \{a^1,\ldots,a^m\} \subset \R^n$, we consider the problem of reducing the input set for the computation of the minimum enclosing ball of $\cA$. In this note, given an approximate solution to the minimum enclosing ball problem, we propose a simple procedure to identify and eliminate points in $\cA$ that are guaranteed to lie … Read more
Given ${\cal A} := \{a^1,\ldots,a^m\} \subset \R^n$ with corresponding positive weights ${\cal W} := \{\omega_1,\ldots,\omega_m\}$, the weighted Euclidean one-center problem, which is a generalization of the minimum enclosing ball problem, involves the computation of a point $c_{\cal A} \in \R^n$ that minimizes the maximum weighted Euclidean distance from $c_{\cal A}$ to each point in ${\cal … Read more