文章基本信息

标题：A 21/16-Approximation for the Minimum 3-Path Partition Problem
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作者：Yong Chen ; Randy Goebel ; Bing Su 等
期刊名称：LIPIcs : Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics
电子版ISSN：1868-8969
出版年度：2019
卷号：149
页码：1-20
DOI：10.4230/LIPIcs.ISAAC.2019.46
出版社：Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik
摘要：The minimum k-path partition (Min-k-PP for short) problem targets to partition an input graph into the smallest number of paths, each of which has order at most k. We focus on the special case when k=3. Existing literature mainly concentrates on the exact algorithms for special graphs, such as trees. Because of the challenge of NP-hardness on general graphs, the approximability of the Min-3-PP problem attracts researchers' attention. The first approximation algorithm dates back about 10 years and achieves an approximation ratio of 3/2, which was recently improved to 13/9 and further to 4/3. We investigate the 3/2-approximation algorithm for the Min-3-PP problem and discover several interesting structural properties. Instead of studying the unweighted Min-3-PP problem directly, we design a novel weight schema for l-paths, l in {1, 2, 3}, and investigate the weighted version. A greedy local search algorithm is proposed to generate a heavy path partition. We show the achieved path partition has the least 1-paths, which is also the key ingredient for the algorithms with ratios 13/9 and 4/3. When switching back to the unweighted objective function, we prove the approximation ratio 21/16 via amortized analysis.
关键词：3-path partition; exact set cover; approximation algorithm; local search; amortized analysis