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oai:drops-oai.dagstuhl.de:10452 2024-03-06T10:46:01Z ddc:004 open_access

A Weighted Approach to the Maximum Cardinality Bipartite Matching Problem with Applications in Geometric Settings Lahn, Nathaniel Raghvendra, Sharath Bipartite matching Bottleneck matching We present a weighted approach to compute a maximum cardinality matching in an arbitrary bipartite graph. Our main result is a new algorithm that takes as input a weighted bipartite graph G(A cup B,E) with edge weights of 0 or 1. Let w <= n be an upper bound on the weight of any matching in G. Consider the subgraph induced by all the edges of G with a weight 0. Suppose every connected component in this subgraph has O(r) vertices and O(mr/n) edges. We present an algorithm to compute a maximum cardinality matching in G in O~(m(sqrt{w} + sqrt{r} + wr/n)) time. When all the edge weights are 1 (symmetrically when all weights are 0), our algorithm will be identical to the well-known Hopcroft-Karp (HK) algorithm, which runs in O(m sqrt{n}) time. However, if we can carefully assign weights of 0 and 1 on its edges such that both w and r are sub-linear in n and wr=O(n^{gamma}) for gamma < 3/2, then we can compute maximum cardinality matching in G in o(m sqrt{n}) time. Using our algorithm, we obtain a new O~(n^{4/3}/epsilon^4) time algorithm to compute an epsilon-approximate bottleneck matching of A,B subsetR^2 and an 1/(epsilon^{O(d)}}n^{1+(d-1)/(2d-1)}) poly log n time algorithm for computing epsilon-approximate bottleneck matching in d-dimensions. All previous algorithms take Omega(n^{3/2}) time. Given any graph G(A cup B,E) that has an easily computable balanced vertex separator for every subgraph G'(V',E') of size |V'|^{delta}, for delta in [1/2,1), we can apply our algorithm to compute a maximum matching in O~(mn^{delta/1+delta}) time improving upon the O(m sqrt{n}) time taken by the HK-Algorithm. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Nathaniel Lahn and Sharath Raghvendra 2019 Is Part Of LIPIcs, Volume 129, 35th International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG 2019) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2019.48 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-104528 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2019.48 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode