Computer Science – Data Structures and Algorithms
Scientific paper
2011-10-10
Computer Science
Data Structures and Algorithms
27 pages, 1 figure
Scientific paper
We study the submodular ranking problem in the presence of metric costs. This is motivated by applications in broadcast scheduling and web-search ranking. The input to the minimum latency submodular cover (MLSC) problem consists of a metric $(V,d)$ with source $r\in V$ and $m$ monotone submodular functions $f_1, f_2, ..., f_m: 2^V \rightarrow [0,1]$. The goal is to find a path originating at $r$ that minimizes the total cover time of all functions; the cover time of function $f_i$ is the smallest value $t$ such that $f_i$ has value one on the vertices visited within distance $t$ along the path. We give a polynomial time $O(\log \frac1\eps \cdot \log^{2+\delta} |V|)$-approximation algorithm for this problem; here $\delta>0$ is any constant, and $\eps$ is the minimum positive marginal increase of any function $f_i$. When the underlying metric is uniform, we obtain the Submodular Ranking (SR), for which an $O(\log \frac1\eps)$-approximation algorithm was given by Azar and Gamzu [AzarG11]. In fact, our general result is enabled by a simpler analysis of [AzarG11]. We also consider the latency covering Steiner tree problem (LCST), which is an interesting special case of MLSC. Here, each function $f_i$ is associated with a group $g_i\subseteq V$ and requirement $k_i$ such that $f_i(S) = \min{\frac{|g_i\cap S|}{k_i},\, 1}$. This is a natural generalization of the latency covering Steiner tree and generalized min-sum set cover problems. We obtain an $O(\log^2|V|)$-approximation algorithm for LCST. This relies on a new and stronger LP relaxation for covering Steiner tree, that might be of independent interest. Finally, in a somewhat different direction, we consider the stochastic SR, and obtain an $O(\log 1/ \eps)$-approximation algorithm, which is best possible. Our result generalizes several previously studied stochastic problems.
der Zwaan Ruben van
Im Sungjin
Nagarajan Viswanath
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