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Questions tagged [approximation]

Questions about algorithms that solve problems up to some bounded error.

626 questions
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3 answers

Decision problems vs "real" problems that aren't yes-or-no

I read in many places that some problems are difficult to approximate (it is NP-hard to approximate them). But approximation is not a decision problem: the answer is a real number and not Yes or No. Also for each desired approximation factor,…
Ran G.
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Algorithm to distribute items "evenly"

I'm searching for an algorithm to distribute values from a list so that the resulting list is as "balanced" or "evenly distributed" as possible (in quotes because I'm not sure these are the best ways to describe it... later I'll provide a way to…
moraes
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Why are NP-complete problems so different in terms of their approximation?

I'd like to begin the question by saying I'm a programmer, and I don't have a lot of background in complexity theory. One thing that I've noticed is that while many problems are NP-complete, when extended to optimization problems, some are far more…
GregRos
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Approximating the Kolmogorov complexity

I've studied something about the Kolmogorov Complexity, read some articles and books from Vitanyi and Li and used the concept of Normalized Compression Distance to verify the stilometry of authors (identify how each author writes some text and group…
woliveirajr
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Approximate minimum-weighted tree decomposition on complete graphs

Say I have a weighted undirected complete graph $G = (V, E)$. Each edge $e = (u, v, w)$ is assigned with a positive weight $w$. I want to calculate the minimum-weighted $(d, h)$-tree-decomposition. By $(d, h)$-tree-decomposition, I mean to divide…
Geni
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Why there are no approximation algorithms for SAT and other decision problems?

I have an NP-complete decision problem. Given an instance of the problem, I would like to design an algorithm that outputs YES, if the problem is feasible, and, NO, otherwise. (Of course, if the algorithm is not optimal, it will make errors.) I…
Ribz
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PTAS definition vs. FPTAS

From what I read in the preliminary version of a chapter of the book “Lectures on Scheduling” edited by R.H. M¨ohring, C.N. Potts, A.S. Schulz, G.J. Woeginger, L.A. Wolsey, to appear around 2011 A.D. This is the PTAS Definition: A polynomial time…
M a m a D
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What does the 2 in a 2-approximation algorithm mean?

Does the 2 in a 2-approximation algorithm mean the solution is within 2*OPT or OPT/2?
Hrishikesh
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14
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1 answer

Approximation of minimum bandwidth on binary trees

Minimum bandwidth problem is to a find an ordering of graph nodes on integer line that minimizes the largest distance between any two adjacent nodes. The decision problem is NP-complete even for binary trees. Complexity Results for Bandwidth…
Mohammad Al-Turkistany
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How can you bound the error of an approximation without knowing the optimal solution?

I been looking at this site and it says that people found solutions for TSP tours that are just 0.031% higher than the optimal tour is. Without finding the optimal tour how does they know what length it is supposed to be?
Ilya Gazman
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Why are all problems in FPTAS also in FPT?

According to the Wikipedia article on polynomial-time approximation schemes: All problems in FPTAS are fixed-parameter tractable. This result surprises me - these classes seem to be totally different from one another. FPTAS characterizes problems…
templatetypedef
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Is this combinatorial optimisation problem similar to any known problem?

The problem is as follows: We have a two dimensional array/grid of numbers, each representing some "benefit" or "profit." We also have two fixed integers $w$ and $h$ (for "width" and "height".) And a fixed integer $n$. We now wish to overlay $n$…
fiftyeight
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Does #$P$-Completeness imply approximation hardness?

Let $\Pi$ be some counting problem which is known to be #$P$-Complete. Does it imply that $\Pi$ is $APX$-hard (i.e. no PTAS for the problem exists unless $P=NP$)?
R B
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What is a bicriteria approximation algorithm?

What is a bicriteria approximation algorithm? This keeps coming up in the case of data stream clustering. Is this related to multi-objective optimization? This is where I came across it: cis.upenn.edu/~sudipto/mypapers/datastream.pdf. The paper is…
Suhas Lohit
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Average length of s-t (simple) paths in a directed graph

Given the fact that $s$-$t$ path enumeration is a #P-complete problem, could there be efficient methods that compute (or at least approximate) the average length of $s$-$t$ path without enumerating them? What if paths are allowed to revisit…
liuyu
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