4 Search Results for "Behsaz, Babak"

Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2025.62
Polynomial-Time Constant-Approximation for Fair Sum-Of-Radii Clustering

Authors: Sina Bagheri Nezhad, Sayan Bandyapadhyay, and Tianzhi Chen

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 351, 33rd Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2025)

Abstract
In a seminal work, Chierichetti et al. [Chierichetti et al., 2017] introduced the (t,k)-fair clustering problem: Given a set of red points and a set of blue points in a metric space, a clustering is called fair if the number of red points in each cluster is at most t times and at least 1/t times the number of blue points in that cluster. The goal is to compute a fair clustering with at most k clusters that optimizes certain objective function. Considering this problem, they designed a polynomial-time O(1)- and O(t)-approximation for the k-center and the k-median objective, respectively. Recently, Carta et al. [Carta et al., 2024] studied this problem with the sum-of-radii objective and obtained a (6+ε)-approximation with running time O((k log_{1+ε}(k/ε))^k n^O(1)), i.e., fixed-parameter tractable in k. Here n is the input size. In this work, we design the first polynomial-time O(1)-approximation for (t,k)-fair clustering with the sum-of-radii objective, improving the result of Carta et al. Our result places sum-of-radii in the same group of objectives as k-center, that admit polynomial-time O(1)-approximations. This result also implies a polynomial-time O(1)-approximation for the Euclidean version of the problem, for which an f(k)⋅n^O(1)-time (1+ε)-approximation was known due to Drexler et al. [Drexler et al., 2023]. Here f is an exponential function of k. We are also able to extend our result to any arbitrary 𝓁 ≥ 2 number of colors when t = 1. This matches known results for the k-center and k-median objectives in this case. The significant disparity of sum-of-radii compared to k-center and k-median presents several complex challenges, all of which we successfully overcome in our work. Our main contribution is a novel cluster-merging-based analysis technique for sum-of-radii that helps us achieve the constant-approximation bounds.
Cite as

Sina Bagheri Nezhad, Sayan Bandyapadhyay, and Tianzhi Chen. Polynomial-Time Constant-Approximation for Fair Sum-Of-Radii Clustering. In 33rd Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 351, pp. 62:1-62:16, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{bagherinezhad_et_al:LIPIcs.ESA.2025.62,
  author =	{Bagheri Nezhad, Sina and Bandyapadhyay, Sayan and Chen, Tianzhi},
  title =	{{Polynomial-Time Constant-Approximation for Fair Sum-Of-Radii Clustering}},
  booktitle =	{33rd Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2025)},
  pages =	{62:1--62:16},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-395-9},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{351},
  editor =	{Benoit, Anne and Kaplan, Haim and Wild, Sebastian 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.2025.62},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-245309},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2025.62},
  annote =	{Keywords: fair clustering, sum-of-radii clustering, approximation algorithms}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2025.62
On Approximability of 𝓁₂² Min-Sum Clustering

Authors: Karthik C. S., Euiwoong Lee, Yuval Rabani, Chris Schwiegelshohn, and Samson Zhou

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 332, 41st International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG 2025)

Abstract
The 𝓁₂² min-sum k-clustering problem is to partition an input set into clusters C_1,…,C_k to minimize ∑_{i=1}^k ∑_{p,q ∈ C_i} ‖p-q‖₂². Although 𝓁₂² min-sum k-clustering is NP-hard, it is not known whether it is NP-hard to approximate 𝓁₂² min-sum k-clustering beyond a certain factor. In this paper, we give the first hardness-of-approximation result for the 𝓁₂² min-sum k-clustering problem. We show that it is NP-hard to approximate the objective to a factor better than 1.056 and moreover, assuming a balanced variant of the Johnson Coverage Hypothesis, it is NP-hard to approximate the objective to a factor better than 1.327. We then complement our hardness result by giving a fast PTAS for 𝓁₂² min-sum k-clustering. Specifically, our algorithm runs in time O(n^{1+o(1)}d⋅ 2^{(k/ε)^O(1)}), which is the first nearly linear time algorithm for this problem. We also consider a learning-augmented setting, where the algorithm has access to an oracle that outputs a label i ∈ [k] for input point, thereby implicitly partitioning the input dataset into k clusters that induce an approximately optimal solution, up to some amount of adversarial error α ∈ [0,1/2). We give a polynomial-time algorithm that outputs a (1+γα)/(1-α)²-approximation to 𝓁₂² min-sum k-clustering, for a fixed constant γ > 0.
Cite as

Karthik C. S., Euiwoong Lee, Yuval Rabani, Chris Schwiegelshohn, and Samson Zhou. On Approximability of 𝓁₂² Min-Sum Clustering. In 41st International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 332, pp. 62:1-62:18, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{karthikc.s._et_al:LIPIcs.SoCG.2025.62,
  author =	{Karthik C. S. and Lee, Euiwoong and Rabani, Yuval and Schwiegelshohn, Chris and Zhou, Samson},
  title =	{{On Approximability of 𝓁₂² Min-Sum Clustering}},
  booktitle =	{41st International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG 2025)},
  pages =	{62:1--62:18},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-370-6},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{332},
  editor =	{Aichholzer, Oswin and Wang, Haitao},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2025.62},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-232142},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2025.62},
  annote =	{Keywords: Clustering, hardness of approximation, polynomial-time approximation schemes, learning-augmented algorithms}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.STACS.2025.57
Approximate Minimum Tree Cover in All Symmetric Monotone Norms Simultaneously

Authors: Matthias Kaul, Kelin Luo, Matthias Mnich, and Heiko Röglin

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 327, 42nd International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS 2025)

Abstract
We study the problem of partitioning a set of n objects in a metric space into k clusters V₁,...,V_k. The quality of the clustering is measured by considering the vector of cluster costs and then minimizing some monotone symmetric norm of that vector (in particular, this includes the 𝓁_p-norms). For the costs of the clusters we take the weight of a minimum-weight spanning tree on the objects in V_i, which may serve as a proxy for the cost of traversing all objects in the cluster, for example in the context of Multirobot Coverage as studied by Zheng, Koenig, Kempe, Jain (IROS 2005), but also as a shape-invariant measure of cluster density similar to Single-Linkage Clustering. This problem has been studied by Even, Garg, Könemann, Ravi, Sinha (Oper. Res. Lett., 2004) for the setting of minimizing the weight of the largest cluster (i.e., using 𝓁_∞) as Min-Max Tree Cover, for which they gave a constant-factor approximation algorithm. We provide a careful adaptation of their algorithm to compute solutions which are approximately optimal with respect to all monotone symmetric norms simultaneously, and show how to find them in polynomial time. In fact, our algorithm is purely combinatorial and can process metric spaces with 10,000 points in less than a second. As an extension, we also consider the case where instead of a target number of clusters we are provided with a set of depots in the space such that every cluster should contain at least one such depot. One can consider these as the fixed starting points of some agents that will traverse all points of a cluster. For this setting also we are able to give a polynomial-time algorithm computing a constant-factor approximation with respect to all monotone symmetric norms simultaneously. To show that the algorithmic results are tight up to the precise constant of approximation attainable, we also prove that such clustering problems are already APX-hard when considering only one single 𝓁_p norm for the objective.
Cite as

Matthias Kaul, Kelin Luo, Matthias Mnich, and Heiko Röglin. Approximate Minimum Tree Cover in All Symmetric Monotone Norms Simultaneously. In 42nd International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 327, pp. 57:1-57:18, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{kaul_et_al:LIPIcs.STACS.2025.57,
  author =	{Kaul, Matthias and Luo, Kelin and Mnich, Matthias and R\"{o}glin, Heiko},
  title =	{{Approximate Minimum Tree Cover in All Symmetric Monotone Norms Simultaneously}},
  booktitle =	{42nd International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS 2025)},
  pages =	{57:1--57:18},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-365-2},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{327},
  editor =	{Beyersdorff, Olaf and Pilipczuk, Micha{\l} and Pimentel, Elaine and Thắng, Nguy\~{ê}n Kim},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.STACS.2025.57},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-228821},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.STACS.2025.57},
  annote =	{Keywords: Clustering, spanning trees, all-norm approximation}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.APPROX-RANDOM.2014.17
Approximation Algorithms for Minimum-Load k-Facility Location

Authors: Sara Ahmadian, Babak Behsaz, Zachary Friggstad, Amin Jorati, Mohammad R. Salavatipour, and Chaitanya Swamy

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 28, Approximation, Randomization, and Combinatorial Optimization. Algorithms and Techniques (APPROX/RANDOM 2014)

Abstract
We consider a facility-location problem that abstracts settings where the cost of serving the clients assigned to a facility is incurred by the facility. Formally, we consider the minimum-load k-facility location (MLkFL) problem, which is defined as follows. We have a set F of facilities, a set C of clients, and an integer k > 0. Assigning client j to a facility f incurs a connection cost d(f, j). The goal is to open a set F' of k facilities, and assign each client j to a facility f(j) in F' so as to minimize maximum, over all facilities in F', of the sum of distances of clients j assigned to F' to F'. We call this sum the load of facility f. This problem was studied under the name of min-max star cover in [6, 2], who (among other results) gave bicriteria approximation algorithms for MLkFL for when F = C. MLkFL is rather poorly understood, and only an O(k)-approximation is currently known for MLkFL, even for line metrics. Our main result is the first polynomial time approximation scheme (PTAS) for MLkFL on line metrics (note that no non-trivial true approximation of any kind was known for this metric). Complementing this, we prove that MLkFL is strongly NP-hard on line metrics. We also devise a quasi-PTAS for MLkFL on tree metrics. MLkFL turns out to be surprisingly challenging even on line metrics, and resilient to attack by the variety of techniques that have been successfully applied to facility-location problems. For instance, we show that: (a) even a configuration-style LP-relaxation has a bad integrality gap; and (b) a multi-swap k-median style local-search heuristic has a bad locality gap. Thus, we need to devise various novel techniques to attack MLkFL. Our PTAS for line metrics consists of two main ingredients. First, we prove that there always exists a near-optimal solution possessing some nice structural properties. A novel aspect of this proof is that we first move to a mixed-integer LP (MILP) encoding the problem, and argue that a MILP-solution minimizing a certain potential function possesses the desired structure, and then use a rounding algorithm for the generalized-assignment problem to "transfer" this structure to the rounded integer solution. Complementing this, we show that these structural properties enable one to find such a structured solution via dynamic programming.
Cite as

Sara Ahmadian, Babak Behsaz, Zachary Friggstad, Amin Jorati, Mohammad R. Salavatipour, and Chaitanya Swamy. Approximation Algorithms for Minimum-Load k-Facility Location. In Approximation, Randomization, and Combinatorial Optimization. Algorithms and Techniques (APPROX/RANDOM 2014). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 28, pp. 17-33, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2014)

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@InProceedings{ahmadian_et_al:LIPIcs.APPROX-RANDOM.2014.17,
  author =	{Ahmadian, Sara and Behsaz, Babak and Friggstad, Zachary and Jorati, Amin and Salavatipour, Mohammad R. and Swamy, Chaitanya},
  title =	{{Approximation Algorithms for Minimum-Load k-Facility Location}},
  booktitle =	{Approximation, Randomization, and Combinatorial Optimization. Algorithms and Techniques (APPROX/RANDOM 2014)},
  pages =	{17--33},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-939897-74-3},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2014},
  volume =	{28},
  editor =	{Jansen, Klaus and Rolim, Jos\'{e} and Devanur, Nikhil R. and Moore, Cristopher},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.APPROX-RANDOM.2014.17},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-47154},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.APPROX-RANDOM.2014.17},
  annote =	{Keywords: approximation algorithms, min-max star cover, facility location, line metrics}
}
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