The min-diameter of a directed graph G is a measure of the largest distance between nodes. It is equal to the maximum min-distance d_{min}(u,v) across all pairs u,v ∈ V(G), where d_{min}(u,v) = min(d(u,v), d(v,u)). Min-diameter approximation in directed graphs has attracted attention recently as an offshoot of the classical and well-studied diameter approximation problem. Our work provides a 3/2-approximation algorithm for min-diameter in DAGs running in time O(m^{1.426} n^{0.288}), and a faster almost-3/2-approximation variant which runs in time O(m^{0.713} n). (An almost-α-approximation algorithm determines the min-diameter to within a multiplicative factor of α plus constant additive error.) This is the first known algorithm to solve 3/2-approximation for min-diameter in sparse DAGs in truly subquadratic time O(m^{2-ε}) for ε > 0; previously only a 2-approximation was known. By a conditional lower bound result of [Abboud et al, SODA 2016], a better than 3/2-approximation can't be achieved in truly subquadratic time under the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis (SETH), so our result is conditionally tight. We additionally obtain a new conditional lower bound for min-diameter approximation in general directed graphs, showing that under SETH, one cannot achieve an approximation factor below 2 in truly subquadratic time. Our work also presents the first study of approximating bichromatic min-diameter, which is the maximum min-distance between oppositely colored vertices in a 2-colored graph. We show that SETH implies that in DAGs, a better than 2 approximation cannot be achieved in truly subquadratic time, and that in general graphs, an approximation within a factor below 5/2 is similarly out of reach. We then obtain an O(m)-time algorithm which determines if bichromatic min-diameter is finite, and an almost-2-approximation algorithm for bichromatic min-diameter with runtime Õ(min(m^{4/3} n^{1/3}, m^{1/2} n^{3/2})).
@InProceedings{berger_et_al:LIPIcs.ESA.2023.17, author = {Berger, Aaron and Kaufmann, Jenny and Vassilevska Williams, Virginia}, title = {{Approximating Min-Diameter: Standard and Bichromatic}}, booktitle = {31st Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2023)}, pages = {17:1--17:14}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-95977-295-2}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2023}, volume = {274}, editor = {G{\o}rtz, Inge Li and Farach-Colton, Martin and Puglisi, Simon J. and Herman, Grzegorz}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2023.17}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-186705}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2023.17}, annote = {Keywords: diameter, min distances, fine-grained, approximation algorithm} }
Feedback for Dagstuhl Publishing