,                
                            
                    Maximilian Katzmann                    
                
                    
            
                
    Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Finding a minimum vertex cover in a network is a fundamental NP-complete graph problem. One way to deal with its computational hardness, is to trade the qualitative performance of an algorithm (allowing non-optimal outputs) for an improved running time. For the vertex cover problem, there is a gap between theory and practice when it comes to understanding this tradeoff. On the one hand, it is known that it is NP-hard to approximate a minimum vertex cover within a factor of √2. On the other hand, a simple greedy algorithm yields close to optimal approximations in practice. A promising approach towards understanding this discrepancy is to recognize the differences between theoretical worst-case instances and real-world networks. Following this direction, we close the gap between theory and practice by providing an algorithm that efficiently computes nearly optimal vertex cover approximations on hyperbolic random graphs; a network model that closely resembles real-world networks in terms of degree distribution, clustering, and the small-world property. More precisely, our algorithm computes a (1 + o(1))-approximation, asymptotically almost surely, and has a running time of 𝒪(m log(n)). The proposed algorithm is an adaption of the successful greedy approach, enhanced with a procedure that improves on parts of the graph where greedy is not optimal. This makes it possible to introduce a parameter that can be used to tune the tradeoff between approximation performance and running time. Our empirical evaluation on real-world networks shows that this allows for improving over the near-optimal results of the greedy approach.
@InProceedings{blasius_et_al:LIPIcs.ESA.2021.20,
  author =	{Bl\"{a}sius, Thomas and Friedrich, Tobias and Katzmann, Maximilian},
  title =	{{Efficiently Approximating Vertex Cover on Scale-Free Networks with Underlying Hyperbolic Geometry}},
  booktitle =	{29th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2021)},
  pages =	{20:1--20:15},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-204-4},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2021},
  volume =	{204},
  editor =	{Mutzel, Petra and Pagh, Rasmus 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.2021.20},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-146012},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2021.20},
  annote =	{Keywords: vertex cover, approximation, random graphs, hyperbolic geometry, efficient algorithm}
}