,
Aditya Pillai
,
Roy Schwartz,
Mohit Singh
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
We consider the Max--Section problem, where we are given an undirected graph G=(V,E)equipped with non-negative edge weights w: E → R_+ and the goal is to find a partition of V into three equisized parts while maximizing the total weight of edges crossing between different parts. Max-3-Section is closely related to other well-studied graph partitioning problems, e.g., Max-Cut, Max-3-Cut, and Max-Bisection. We present a polynomial time algorithm achieving an approximation of 0.795, that improves upon the previous best known approximation of 0.673. The requirement of multiple parts that have equal sizes renders Max-3-Section much harder to cope with compared to, e.g., Max-Bisection. We show a new algorithm that combines the existing approach of Lassere hierarchy along with a random cut strategy that suffices to give our result.
@InProceedings{katzelnick_et_al:LIPIcs.ESA.2023.69,
author = {Katzelnick, Dor and Pillai, Aditya and Schwartz, Roy and Singh, Mohit},
title = {{An Improved Approximation Algorithm for the Max-3-Section Problem}},
booktitle = {31st Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2023)},
pages = {69:1--69:17},
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.2023.69},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-187229},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2023.69},
annote = {Keywords: Approximation Algorithms, Semidefinite Programming, Max-Cut, Max-Bisection}
}