In many optimization problems, a solution can be viewed as ascribing a ``cost\'\' to each client, and the goal is to optimize some aggregation of the per-client costs. We often optimize some $L_p$-norm (or some other symmetric convex function or norm) of the vector of costs---though different applications may suggest different norms to use. Ideally, we could obtain a solution that optimizes several norms simultaneously. In this paper, we examine approximation algorithms that simultaneously perform well on all norms, or on all $L_p$ norms. A natural problem in this framework is the $L_p$ Set Cover problem, which generalizes \textsc{Set Cover} and \textsc{Min-Sum Set Cover}. We show that the greedy algorithm \emph{simultaneously gives a $(p + \ln p + O(1))$-approximation for all $p$, and show that this approximation ratio is optimal up to constants} under reasonable complexity-theoretic assumptions. We additionally show how to use our analysis techniques to give similar results for the more general \emph{submodular set cover}, and prove some results for the so-called \emph{pipelined set cover} problem. We then go on to examine approximation algorithms in the ``all-norms\'\' and the ``all-$L_p$-norms\'\' frameworks more broadly, and present algorithms and structural results for other problems such as $k$-facility-location, TSP, and average flow-time minimization, extending and unifying previously known results.
@InProceedings{golovin_et_al:LIPIcs.FSTTCS.2008.1753, author = {Golovin, Daniel and Gupta, Anupam and Kumar, Amit and Tangwongsan, Kanat}, title = {{All-Norms and All-L\underlinep-Norms Approximation Algorithms}}, booktitle = {IARCS Annual Conference on Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science}, pages = {199--210}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-939897-08-8}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2008}, volume = {2}, editor = {Hariharan, Ramesh and Mukund, Madhavan and Vinay, V}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.FSTTCS.2008.1753}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-17537}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.FSTTCS.2008.1753}, annote = {Keywords: Approximation algorithms, set-cover problems, combinatorial optimization, sampling minkowski norms} }
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