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On Sparse Hitting Sets: From Fair Vertex Cover to Highway Dimension

Authors Johannes Blum , Yann Disser , Andreas Emil Feldmann , Siddharth Gupta , Anna Zych-Pawlewicz

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Author Details

Johannes Blum
  • Universität Konstanz, Germany
Yann Disser
  • Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany
Andreas Emil Feldmann
  • Charles University, Prague, Czechia
Siddharth Gupta
  • University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
Anna Zych-Pawlewicz
  • University of Warsaw, Poland

Funding

  • Feldmann, Andreas Emil: Supported by the Czech Science Foundation GAČR (grant #19-27871X).
  • Gupta, Siddharth: Supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) grant no: EP/V007793/1.
  • Zych-Pawlewicz, Anna: This work is part of the project CUTACOMBS that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 714704).

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Johannes Blum, Yann Disser, Andreas Emil Feldmann, Siddharth Gupta, and Anna Zych-Pawlewicz. On Sparse Hitting Sets: From Fair Vertex Cover to Highway Dimension. In 17th International Symposium on Parameterized and Exact Computation (IPEC 2022). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 249, pp. 5:1-5:23, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2022) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.IPEC.2022.5

Abstract

We consider the Sparse Hitting Set (Sparse-HS) problem, where we are given a set system (V,ℱ,ℬ) with two families ℱ,ℬ of subsets of the universe V. The task is to find a hitting set for ℱ that minimizes the maximum number of elements in any of the sets of ℬ. This generalizes several problems that have been studied in the literature. Our focus is on determining the complexity of some of these special cases of Sparse-HS with respect to the sparseness k, which is the optimum number of hitting set elements in any set of ℬ (i.e., the value of the objective function).
For the Sparse Vertex Cover (Sparse-VC) problem, the universe is given by the vertex set V of a graph, and ℱ is its edge set. We prove NP-hardness for sparseness k ≥ 2 and polynomial time solvability for k = 1. We also provide a polynomial-time 2-approximation algorithm for any k. A special case of Sparse-VC is Fair Vertex Cover (Fair-VC), where the family ℬ is given by vertex neighbourhoods. For this problem it was open whether it is FPT (or even XP) parameterized by the sparseness k. We answer this question in the negative, by proving NP-hardness for constant k. We also provide a polynomial-time (2-1/k)-approximation algorithm for Fair-VC, which is better than any approximation algorithm possible for Sparse-VC or the Vertex Cover problem (under the Unique Games Conjecture).
We then switch to a different set of problems derived from Sparse-HS related to the highway dimension, which is a graph parameter modelling transportation networks. In recent years a growing literature has shown interesting algorithms for graphs of low highway dimension. To exploit the structure of such graphs, most of them compute solutions to the r-Shortest Path Cover (r-SPC) problem, where r > 0, ℱ contains all shortest paths of length between r and 2r, and ℬ contains all balls of radius 2r. It is known that there is an XP algorithm that computes solutions to r-SPC of sparseness at most h if the input graph has highway dimension h. However it was not known whether a corresponding FPT algorithm exists as well. We prove that r-SPC and also the related r-Highway Dimension (r-HD) problem, which can be used to formally define the highway dimension of a graph, are both W[1]-hard. Furthermore, by the result of Abraham et al. [ICALP 2011] there is a polynomial-time O(log k)-approximation algorithm for r-HD, but for r-SPC such an algorithm is not known. We prove that r-SPC admits a polynomial-time O(log n)-approximation algorithm.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Fixed parameter tractability
  • Theory of computation → Approximation algorithms analysis
Keywords
  • sparse hitting set
  • fair vertex cover
  • highway dimension

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