Given a property (graph class) $\Pi$, a graph $G$, and an integer $k$, the \emph{$\Pi$-completion} problem consists in deciding whether we can turn $G$ into a graph with the property $\Pi$ by adding at most $k$ edges to $G$. The $\Pi$-completion problem is known to be NP-hard for general graphs when $\Pi$ is the property of being a proper interval graph (PIG). In this work, we study the PIG-completion problem %when $\Pi$ is the class of proper interval graphs (PIG) within different subclasses of chordal graphs. We show that the problem remains NP-complete even when restricted to split graphs. We then turn our attention to positive results and present polynomial time algorithms to solve the PIG-completion problem when the input is restricted to caterpillar and threshold graphs. We also present an efficient algorithm for the minimum co-bipartite-completion for quasi-threshold graphs, which provides a lower bound for the PIG-completion problem within this graph class.
We show that the problem of counting the number of $n$-variable unate functions reduces to the problem of counting the number of $n$-variable monotone functions. Using recently obtained results on $n$-variable monotone functions, we obtain counts of $n$-variable unate functions up to $n=9$. We use an enumeration strategy to obtain the number of $n$-variable balanced monotone functions up to $n=7$. We show that the problem of counting the number of $n$-variable balanced unate functions reduces to the problem of counting the number of $n$-variable balanced monotone functions, and consequently, we obtain the number of $n$-variable balanced unate functions up to $n=7$. Using enumeration, we obtain the numbers of equivalence classes of $n$-variable balanced monotone functions, unate functions and balanced unate functions up to $n=6$. Further, for each of the considered sub-class of $n$-variable monotone and unate functions, we also obtain the corresponding numbers of $n$-variable non-degenerate functions.
We consider the problem of counting 4-cycles ($C_4$) in an undirected graph $G$ of $n$ vertices and $m$ edges (in bipartite graphs, 4-cycles are also often referred to as $\textit{butterflies}$). There have been a number of previous algorithms for this problem based on sorting the graph by degree and using randomized hash tables. These are appealing in theory due to compact storage and fast access on average. But, the performance of hash tables can degrade unpredictably and are also vulnerable to adversarial input. We develop a new simpler algorithm for counting $C_4$ requiring $O(m\bar\delta(G))$ time and $O(n)$ space, where $\bar \delta(G) \leq O(\sqrt{m})$ is the $\textit{average degeneracy}$ parameter introduced by Burkhardt, Faber \& Harris (2020). It has several practical improvements over previous algorithms; for example, it is fully deterministic, does not require any sorting of the input graph, and uses only addition and array access in its inner loops. To the best of our knowledge, all previous efficient algorithms for $C_4$ counting have required $\Omega(m)$ space in addition to storing the input graph. Our algorithm is very simple and easily adapted to count 4-cycles incident to each vertex and edge. Empirical tests demonstrate that our array-based approach is $4\times$ -- $7\times$ faster on average compared to popular hash table implementations.
We introduce a flexible method to simultaneously infer both the drift and volatility functions of a discretely observed scalar diffusion. We introduce spline bases to represent these functions and develop a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm to infer, a posteriori, the coefficients of these functions in the spline basis. A key innovation is that we use spline bases to model transformed versions of the drift and volatility functions rather than the functions themselves. The output of the algorithm is a posterior sample of plausible drift and volatility functions that are not constrained to any particular parametric family. The flexibility of this approach provides practitioners a powerful investigative tool, allowing them to posit a variety of parametric models to better capture the underlying dynamics of their processes of interest. We illustrate the versatility of our method by applying it to challenging datasets from finance, paleoclimatology, and astrophysics. In view of the parametric diffusion models widely employed in the literature for those examples, some of our results are surprising since they call into question some aspects of these models.
We present an efficient preconditioner for linear problems $A x=y$. It guarantees monotonic convergence of the memory-efficient fixed-point iteration for all accretive systems of the form $A = L + V$, where $L$ is an approximation of $A$, and the system is scaled so that the discrepancy is bounded with $\lVert V \rVert<1$. In contrast to common splitting preconditioners, our approach is not restricted to any particular splitting. Therefore, the approximate problem can be chosen so that an analytic solution is available to efficiently evaluate the preconditioner. We prove that the only preconditioner with this property has the form $(L+I)(I - V)^{-1}$. This unique form moreover permits the elimination of the forward problem from the preconditioned system, often halving the time required per iteration. We demonstrate and evaluate our approach for wave problems, diffusion problems, and pantograph delay differential equations. With the latter we show how the method extends to general, not necessarily accretive, linear systems.
The grounded Laplacian matrix $\LL_{-S}$ of a graph $\calG=(V,E)$ with $n=|V|$ nodes and $m=|E|$ edges is a $(n-s)\times (n-s)$ submatrix of its Laplacian matrix $\LL$, obtained from $\LL$ by deleting rows and columns corresponding to $s=|S| \ll n $ ground nodes forming set $S\subset V$. The smallest eigenvalue of $\LL_{-S}$ plays an important role in various practical scenarios, such as characterizing the convergence rate of leader-follower opinion dynamics, with a larger eigenvalue indicating faster convergence of opinion. In this paper, we study the problem of adding $k \ll n$ edges among all the nonexistent edges forming the candidate edge set $Q = (V\times V)\backslash E$, in order to maximize the smallest eigenvalue of the grounded Laplacian matrix. We show that the objective function of the combinatorial optimization problem is monotone but non-submodular. To solve the problem, we first simplify the problem by restricting the candidate edge set $Q$ to be $(S\times (V\backslash S))\backslash E$, and prove that it has the same optimal solution as the original problem, although the size of set $Q$ is reduced from $O(n^2)$ to $O(n)$. Then, we propose two greedy approximation algorithms. One is a simple greedy algorithm with an approximation ratio $(1-e^{-\alpha\gamma})/\alpha$ and time complexity $O(kn^4)$, where $\gamma$ and $\alpha$ are, respectively, submodularity ratio and curvature, whose bounds are provided for some particular cases. The other is a fast greedy algorithm without approximation guarantee, which has a running time $\tilde{O}(km)$, where $\tilde{O}(\cdot)$ suppresses the ${\rm poly} (\log n)$ factors. Numerous experiments on various real networks are performed to validate the superiority of our algorithms, in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.
We consider the two-pronged fork frame $F$ and the variety $\mathbf{Eq}(B_F)$ generated by its dual closure algebra $B_F$. We describe the finite projective algebras in $\mathbf{Eq}(B_F)$ and give a purely semantic proof that unification in $\mathbf{Eq}(B_F)$ is finitary and not unitary.
Given a hypergraph $\mathcal{H}$, the dual hypergraph of $\mathcal{H}$ is the hypergraph of all minimal transversals of $\mathcal{H}$. The dual hypergraph is always Sperner, that is, no hyperedge contains another. A special case of Sperner hypergraphs are the conformal Sperner hypergraphs, which correspond to the families of maximal cliques of graphs. All these notions play an important role in many fields of mathematics and computer science, including combinatorics, algebra, database theory, etc. In this paper we study conformality of dual hypergraphs. While we do not settle the computational complexity status of recognizing this property, we show that the problem is in co-NP and can be solved in polynomial time for hypergraphs of bounded dimension. In the special case of dimension $3$, we reduce the problem to $2$-Satisfiability. Our approach has an implication in algorithmic graph theory: we obtain a polynomial-time algorithm for recognizing graphs in which all minimal transversals of maximal cliques have size at most $k$, for any fixed $k$.
The complexity class Quantum Statistical Zero-Knowledge ($\mathsf{QSZK}$) captures computational difficulties of the time-bounded quantum state testing problem with respect to the trace distance, known as the Quantum State Distinguishability Problem (QSDP) introduced by Watrous (FOCS 2002). However, QSDP is in $\mathsf{QSZK}$ merely within the constant polarizing regime, similar to its classical counterpart shown by Sahai and Vadhan (JACM 2003) due to the polarization lemma (error reduction for SDP). Recently, Berman, Degwekar, Rothblum, and Vasudevan (TCC 2019) extended the $\mathsf{SZK}$ containment for SDP beyond the polarizing regime via the time-bounded distribution testing problems with respect to the triangular discrimination and the Jensen-Shannon divergence. Our work introduces proper quantum analogs for these problems by defining quantum counterparts for triangular discrimination. We investigate whether the quantum analogs behave similarly to their classical counterparts and examine the limitations of existing approaches to polarization regarding quantum distances. These new $\mathsf{QSZK}$-complete problems improve $\mathsf{QSZK}$ containments for QSDP beyond the polarizing regime and establish a simple $\mathsf{QSZK}$-hardness for the quantum entropy difference problem (QEDP) defined by Ben-Aroya, Schwartz, and Ta-Shma (ToC 2010). Furthermore, we prove that QSDP with some exponentially small errors is in $\mathsf{PP}$, while the same problem without error is in $\mathsf{NQP}$.
In this work we show that given a connectivity graph $G$ of a $[[n,k,d]]$ quantum code, there exists $\{K_i\}_i, K_i \subset G$, such that $\sum_i |K_i|\in \Omega(k), \ |K_i| \in \Omega(d)$, and the $K_i$'s are $\tilde{\Omega}( \sqrt{{k}/{n}})$-expander. If the codes are classical we show instead that the $K_i$'s are $\tilde{\Omega}\left({{k}/{n}}\right)$-expander. We also show converses to these bounds. In particular, we show that the BPT bound for classical codes is tight in all Euclidean dimensions. Finally, we prove structural theorems for graphs with no "dense" subgraphs which might be of independent interest.
Given a set of points $P = (P^+ \sqcup P^-) \subset \mathbb{R}^d$ for some constant $d$ and a supply function $\mu:P\to \mathbb{R}$ such that $\mu(p) > 0~\forall p \in P^+$, $\mu(p) < 0~\forall p \in P^-$, and $\sum_{p\in P}{\mu(p)} = 0$, the geometric transportation problem asks one to find a transportation map $\tau: P^+\times P^-\to \mathbb{R}_{\ge 0}$ such that $\sum_{q\in P^-}{\tau(p, q)} = \mu(p)~\forall p \in P^+$, $\sum_{p\in P^+}{\tau(p, q)} = -\mu(q)~ \forall q \in P^-$, and the weighted sum of Euclidean distances for the pairs $\sum_{(p,q)\in P^+\times P^-}\tau(p, q)\cdot ||q-p||_2$ is minimized. We present the first deterministic algorithm that computes, in near-linear time, a transportation map whose cost is within a $(1 + \varepsilon)$ factor of optimal. More precisely, our algorithm runs in $O(n\varepsilon^{-(d+2)}\log^5{n}\log{\log{n}})$ time for any constant $\varepsilon > 0$. Surprisingly, our result is not only a generalization of a bipartite matching one to arbitrary instances of geometric transportation, but it also reduces the running time for all previously known $(1 + \varepsilon)$-approximation algorithms, randomized or deterministic, even for geometric bipartite matching. In particular, we give the first $(1 + \varepsilon)$-approximate deterministic algorithm for geometric bipartite matching and the first $(1 + \varepsilon)$-approximate deterministic or randomized algorithm for geometric transportation with no dependence on $d$ in the exponent of the running time's polylog. As an additional application of our main ideas, we also give the first randomized near-linear $O(\varepsilon^{-2} m \log^{O(1)} n)$ time $(1 + \varepsilon)$-approximation algorithm for the uncapacitated minimum cost flow (transshipment) problem in undirected graphs with arbitrary real edge costs.