The bottleneck distance is a natural measure of the distance between two finite point sets of equal cardinality. In this work, we consider the problem of indexing a set of @math planar point sets (of varying sizes) to create a database @math that supports nearest bottleneck distance queries: given a query point set @math of size @math , the point sets @math that are closest in terms of bottleneck distance are returned. Without loss of generality, we assume that all point sets belong to the unit box @math in the plane. The main contribution of this work is a trie -based data structure that is space efficient and supports @math -approximate nearest bottleneck queries in @math time, where @math is the minimum bottleneck distance from @math to any point set in @math . A direct consequence, of independent interest, is a simple @math time algorithm to @math -approximate @math , for any two point sets @math and @math . Finally, the querying algorithm proposed is easily adapted to support nearest subset and superset queries.
Bottleneck distance is closely related to the bipartite matching problem, which can be solved by the classic maximum flow technique of Hopcroft and Karp @cite_1 . The current best exact algorithm for planar bipartite matching is due to Efrat @cite_9 and runs in @math time for point sets of size @math .
@cite_9 @cite_1
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In this paper, we study the non-bipartite maximum matching problem in the semi-streaming model. The maximum matching problem in the semi-streaming model has received a significant amount of attention lately. While the problem has been somewhat well solved for bipartite graphs, the known algorithms for non-bipartite graphs use @math passes or @math time to compute a @math approximation. In this paper we provide the first FPTAS (polynomial in @math ) for the problem which is efficient in both the running time and the number of passes. We also show that we can estimate the size of the matching in @math passes using slightly superlinear space. To achieve both results, we use the structural properties of the matching polytope such as the laminarity of the tight sets and total dual integrality. The algorithms are iterative, and are based on the fractional packing and covering framework. However the formulations herein require exponentially many variables or constraints. We use laminarity, metric embeddings and graph sparsification to reduce the space required by the algorithms in between and across the iterations. This is the first use of these ideas in the semi-streaming model to solve a combinatorial optimization problem. We study the online stochastic bipartite matching problem, in a form motivated by display ad allocation on the Internet. In the online, but adversarial case, the celebrated result of Karp, Vazirani and Vazirani gives an approximation ratio of @math , a very familiar bound that holds for many online problems; further, the bound is tight in this case. In the online, stochastic case when nodes are drawn repeatedly from a known distribution, the greedy algorithm matches this approximation ratio, but still, no algorithm is known that beats the @math bound.Our main result is a @math -approximation online algorithm for stochastic bipartite matching, breaking this @math barrier. Furthermore, we show that no online algorithm can produce a @math approximation for an arbitrarily small @math for this problem. Our algorithms are based on computing an optimal offline solution to the expected instance, and using this solution as a guideline in the process of online allocation. We employ a novel application of the idea of the power of two choices from load balancing: we compute two disjoint solutions to the expected instance, and use both of them in the online algorithm in a prescribed preference order. To identify these two disjoint solutions, we solve a max flow problem in a boosted flow graph, and then carefully decompose this maximum flow to two edge-disjoint (near-) matchings. In addition to guiding the online decision making, these two offline solutions are used to characterize an upper bound for the optimum in any scenario. This is done by identifying a cut whose value we can bound under the arrival distribution. At the end, we discuss extensions of our results to more general bipartite allocations that are important in a display ad application. Given a large edge-weighted network @math with @math terminal vertices, we wish to compress it and store, using little memory, the value of the minimum cut (or equivalently, maximum flow) between every bipartition of terminals. One appealing methodology to implement a compression of @math is to construct a : a small network @math with the same @math terminals, in which the minimum cut value between every bipartition of terminals is the same as in @math . This notion was introduced by Hagerup, Katajainen, Nishimura, and Ragde [JCSS '98], who proved that such @math of size at most @math always exists. Obviously, by having access to the smaller network @math , certain computations involving cuts can be carried out much more efficiently. We provide several new bounds, which together narrow the previously known gap from doubly-exponential to only singly-exponential, both for planar and for general graphs. Our first and main result is that every @math -terminal planar network admits a mimicking network @math of size @math , which is moreover a minor of @math . On the other hand, some planar networks @math require @math . For general networks, we show that certain bipartite graphs only admit mimicking networks of size @math , and moreover, every data structure that stores the minimum cut value between all bipartitions of the terminals must use @math machine words. In this paper we present improved bounds for approximating maximum matchings in bipartite graphs in the streaming model. First, we consider the question of how well maximum matching can be approximated in a single pass over the input using O(n) @math n @math 1-1 e @math O(n) @math 1-1 e @math O(n) @math 1-1 e @math O(n) @math 1-e^ -k k^ k-1 (k-1)!=1- 2 k +o(1 k) @math k$ passes in the vertex arrival model using linear space, improving upon previously best known convergence.