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Brownian motion and scaled and interpolated simple random walk can be jointly embedded in a probability space in such a way that almost surely the $n$-step walk is within a uniform distance $O(n^{-1/2}\log n)$ of the Brownian path for all but finitely many positive integers $n$. Almost surely this $n$-step walk will be incompressible in the sense of Kolmogorov complexity, and all {Martin-L\"of random} paths of Brownian motion have such an incompressible close approximant. This strengthens a result of Asarin, who obtained the bound $O(n^{-1/6} \log n)$. The result cannot be improved to $o(n^{-1/2}{\sqrt{\log n}})$.

Many real life optimization problems contain both hard and soft constraints, as well as qualitative conditional preferences. However, there is no single formalism to specify all three kinds of information. We therefore propose a framework, based on both CP-nets and soft constraints, that handles both hard and soft constraints as well as conditional preferences efficiently and uniformly. We study the complexity of testing the consistency of preference statements, and show how soft constraints can faithfully approximate the semantics of conditional preference statements whilst improving the computational complexity

It is shown that under standard hypotheses, if stochastic approximation iterates remain tight, they converge with probability one to what their o.d.e. limit suggests. A simple test for tightness (and therefore a.s. convergence) is provided. Further, estimates on lock-in probability, i.e., the probability of convergence to a specific attractor of the o.d.e. limit given that the iterates visit its domain of attraction, and sample complexity, i.e., the number of steps needed to be within a prescribed neighborhood of the desired limit set with a prescribed probability, are also provided. The latter improve significantly upon existing results in that they require a much weaker condition on the martingale difference noise.

This work is motivated by two problems: 1) The approach of manifolds and spaces by triangulations. 2) The complexity growth in sequences of polyhedra. Considering both problems as related, new criteria and methods for approximating smooth manifolds are deduced. When the sequences of polyhedra are obtained by the action of a discrete group or semigroup, further control is given by geometric, topologic and complexity observables. We give a set of relevant examples to illustrate the results, both in infinite and finite dimensions.

MAP is the problem of finding a most probable instantiation of a set of variables given evidence. MAP has always been perceived to be significantly harder than the related problems of computing the probability of a variable instantiation Pr, or the problem of computing the most probable explanation (MPE). This paper investigates the complexity of MAP in Bayesian networks. Specifically, we show that MAP is complete for NP^PP and provide further negative complexity results for algorithms based on variable elimination. We also show that MAP remains hard even when MPE and Pr become easy. For example, we show that MAP is NP-complete when the networks are restricted to polytrees, and even then can not be effectively approximated. Given the difficulty of computing MAP exactly, and the difficulty of approximating MAP while providing useful guarantees on the resulting approximation, we investigate best effort approximations. We introduce a generic MAP approximation framework. We provide two instantiations of the framework; one for networks which are amenable to exact inference Pr, and one for networks for which even exact inference is too hard. This allows MAP approximation on networks that are too complex to even exactly solve the easier problems, Pr and MPE. Experimental results indicate that using these approximation algorithms provides much better solutions than standard techniques, and provide accurate MAP estimates in many cases.

MAP is the problem of finding a most probable instantiation of a set of variables given evidence. MAP has always been perceived to be significantly harder than the related problems of computing the probability of a variable instantiation Pr, or the problem of computing the most probable explanation (MPE). This paper investigates the complexity of MAP in Bayesian networks. Specifically, we show that MAP is complete for NP^PP and provide further negative complexity results for algorithms based on variable elimination. We also show that MAP remains hard even when MPE and Pr become easy. For example, we show that MAP is NP-complete when the networks are restricted to polytrees, and even then can not be effectively approximated. Given the difficulty of computing MAP exactly, and the difficulty of approximating MAP while providing useful guarantees on the resulting approximation, we investigate best effort approximations. We introduce a generic MAP approximation framework. We provide two instantiations of the framework; one for networks which are amenable to exact inference Pr, and one for networks for which even exact inference is too hard. This allows MAP approximation on networks that are too complex to even exactly solve the easier problems, Pr and MPE. Experimental results indicate that using these approximation algorithms provides much better solutions than standard techniques, and provide accurate MAP estimates in many cases.

We present a near-linear time algorithm that approximates the edit distance between two strings within a polylogarithmic factor; specifically, for strings of length n and every fixed epsilon>0, it can compute a (log n)^O(1/epsilon) approximation in n^(1+epsilon) time. This is an exponential improvement over the previously known factor, 2^(O (sqrt(log n))), with a comparable running time (Ostrovsky and Rabani J.ACM 2007; Andoni and Onak STOC 2009). Previously, no efficient polylogarithmic approximation algorithm was known for any computational task involving edit distance (e.g., nearest neighbor search or sketching). This result arises naturally in the study of a new asymmetric query model. In this model, the input consists of two strings x and y, and an algorithm can access y in an unrestricted manner, while being charged for querying every symbol of x. Indeed, we obtain our main result by designing an algorithm that makes a small number of queries in this model. We then provide a nearly-matching lower bound on the number of queries. Our lower bound is the first to expose hardness of edit distance stemming from the input strings being "repetitive", which means that many of their substrings are approximately identical. Consequently, our lower bound provides the first rigorous separation between edit distance and Ulam distance, which is edit distance on non-repetitive strings, such as permutations.

We present a near-linear time algorithm that approximates the edit distance between two strings within a polylogarithmic factor; specifically, for strings of length n and every fixed epsilon>0, it can compute a (log n)^O(1/epsilon) approximation in n^(1+epsilon) time. This is an exponential improvement over the previously known factor, 2^(O (sqrt(log n))), with a comparable running time (Ostrovsky and Rabani J.ACM 2007; Andoni and Onak STOC 2009). Previously, no efficient polylogarithmic approximation algorithm was known for any computational task involving edit distance (e.g., nearest neighbor search or sketching). This result arises naturally in the study of a new asymmetric query model. In this model, the input consists of two strings x and y, and an algorithm can access y in an unrestricted manner, while being charged for querying every symbol of x. Indeed, we obtain our main result by designing an algorithm that makes a small number of queries in this model. We then provide a nearly-matching lower bound on the number of queries. Our lower bound is the first to expose hardness of edit distance stemming from the input strings being "repetitive", which means that many of their substrings are approximately identical. Consequently, our lower bound provides the first rigorous separation between edit distance and Ulam distance, which is edit distance on non-repetitive strings, such as permutations.

In a wireless system with a large number of distributed nodes, the quality of communication can be greatly improved by pooling the nodes to perform joint transmission/reception. In this paper, we consider the problem of optimally selecting a subset of nodes from potentially a large number of candidates to form a virtual multi-antenna system, while at the same time designing their joint linear transmission strategies. We focus on two specific application scenarios: 1) multiple single antenna transmitters cooperatively transmit to a receiver; 2) a single transmitter transmits to a receiver with the help of a number of cooperative relays. We formulate the joint node selection and beamforming problems as cardinality constrained optimization problems with both discrete variables (used for selecting cooperative nodes) and continuous variables (used for designing beamformers). For each application scenario, we first characterize the computational complexity of the joint optimization problem, and then propose novel semi-definite relaxation (SDR) techniques to obtain approximate solutions. We show that the new SDR algorithms have a guaranteed approximation performance in terms of the gap to global optimality, regardless of channel realizations. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithms is demonstrated via numerical experiments.

We introduce the problem Partial VC Dimension that asks, given a hypergraph $H=(X,E)$ and integers $k$ and $\ell$, whether one can select a set $C\subseteq X$ of $k$ vertices of $H$ such that the set $\{e\cap C, e\in E\}$ of distinct hyperedge-intersections with $C$ has size at least $\ell$. The sets $e\cap C$ define equivalence classes over $E$. Partial VC Dimension is a generalization of VC Dimension, which corresponds to the case $\ell=2^k$, and of Distinguishing Transversal, which corresponds to the case $\ell=|E|$ (the latter is also known as Test Cover in the dual hypergraph). We also introduce the associated fixed-cardinality maximization problem Max Partial VC Dimension that aims at maximizing the number of equivalence classes induced by a solution set of $k$ vertices. We study the algorithmic complexity of Partial VC Dimension and Max Partial VC Dimension both on general hypergraphs and on more restricted instances, in particular, neighborhood hypergraphs of graphs.

The quest for colorful components (connected components where each color is associated with at most one vertex) inside a vertex-colored graph has been widely considered in the last ten years. Here we consider two variants, Minimum Colorful Components (MCC) and Maximum Edges in transitive Closure (MEC), introduced in the context of orthology gene identification in bioinformatics. The input of both MCC and MEC is a vertex-colored graph. MCC asks for the removal of a subset of edges, so that the resulting graph is partitioned in the minimum number of colorful connected components; MEC asks for the removal of a subset of edges, so that the resulting graph is partitioned in colorful connected components and the number of edges in the transitive closure of such a graph is maximized. We study the parameterized and approximation complexity of MCC and MEC, for general and restricted instances.

In order to generate synthetic basket data sets for better benchmark testing, it is important to integrate characteristics from real-life databases into the synthetic basket data sets. The characteristics that could be used for this purpose include the frequent itemsets and association rules. The problem of generating synthetic basket data sets from frequent itemsets is generally referred to as inverse frequent itemset mining. In this paper, we show that the problem of approximate inverse frequent itemset mining is {\bf NP}-complete. Then we propose and analyze an approximate algorithm for approximate inverse frequent itemset mining, and discuss privacy issues related to the synthetic basket data set. In particular, we propose an approximate algorithm to determine the privacy leakage in a synthetic basket data set.

The subject of this work is the patrolling of an environment with the aid of a team of autonomous agents. We consider both the design of open-loop trajectories with optimal properties, and of distributed control laws converging to optimal trajectories. As performance criteria, the refresh time and the latency are considered, i.e., respectively, time gap between any two visits of the same region, and the time necessary to inform every agent about an event occurred in the environment. We associate a graph with the environment, and we study separately the case of a chain, tree, and cyclic graph. For the case of chain graph, we first describe a minimum refresh time and latency team trajectory, and we propose a polynomial time algorithm for its computation. Then, we describe a distributed procedure that steers the robots toward an optimal trajectory. For the case of tree graph, a polynomial time algorithm is developed for the minimum refresh time problem, under the technical assumption of a constant number of robots involved in the patrolling task. Finally, we show that the design of a minimum refresh time trajectory for a cyclic graph is NP-hard, and we develop a constant factor approximation algorithm.

The subject of this work is the patrolling of an environment with the aid of a team of autonomous agents. We consider both the design of open-loop trajectories with optimal properties, and of distributed control laws converging to optimal trajectories. As performance criteria, the refresh time and the latency are considered, i.e., respectively, time gap between any two visits of the same region, and the time necessary to inform every agent about an event occurred in the environment. We associate a graph with the environment, and we study separately the case of a chain, tree, and cyclic graph. For the case of chain graph, we first describe a minimum refresh time and latency team trajectory, and we propose a polynomial time algorithm for its computation. Then, we describe a distributed procedure that steers the robots toward an optimal trajectory. For the case of tree graph, a polynomial time algorithm is developed for the minimum refresh time problem, under the technical assumption of a constant number of robots involved in the patrolling task. Finally, we show that the design of a minimum refresh time trajectory for a cyclic graph is NP-hard, and we develop a constant factor approximation algorithm.

Query evaluation in an XML database requires reconstructing XML subtrees rooted at nodes found by an XML query. Since XML subtree reconstruction can be expensive, one approach to improve query response time is to use reconstruction views - materialized XML subtrees of an XML document, whose nodes are frequently accessed by XML queries. For this approach to be efficient, the principal requirement is a framework for view selection. In this work, we are the first to formalize and study the problem of XML reconstruction view selection. The input is a tree $T$, in which every node $i$ has a size $c_i$ and profit $p_i$, and the size limitation $C$. The target is to find a subset of subtrees rooted at nodes $i_1,\cdots, i_k$ respectively such that $c_{i_1}+\cdots +c_{i_k}\le C$, and $p_{i_1}+\cdots +p_{i_k}$ is maximal. Furthermore, there is no overlap between any two subtrees selected in the solution. We prove that this problem is NP-hard and present a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme (FPTAS) as a solution.

We study the average case complexity of multivariate integration and $L_2$ function approximation for the class $F=C([0,1]^d)$ of continuous functions of $d$ variables. The class $F$ is endowed with the isotropic Wiener measure (Brownian motion in Levy's sense). Furthermore, for both problems, only function values are used as data.

We consider the class of counting problems,i.e. functions in $\#$P, which are self reducible, and have easy decision version, i.e. for every input it is easy to decide if the value of the function $f(x)$ is zero. For example, $\#$independent-sets of all sizes, is such a problem, and one of the hardest of this class, since it is equivalent to $\#$SAT under multiplicative approximation preserving reductions. Using these two powerful properties, self reducibility and easy decision, we prove that all problems/ functions $f$ in this class can be approximated in probabilistic polynomial time within an absolute exponential error $\epsilon\cdot 2^{n'}, \forall\epsilon>0$, which for many of those problems (when $n'=n+$constant) implies additive approximation to the fraction $f(x)/2^n$. (Where $n'$ is the amount of non-determinism of some associated NPTM). Moreover we show that for all these problems we can have multiplicative error to the value $f(x)$, of any desired accuracy (i.e. a RAS), in time of order $2^{2n'/3}poly(n)$, which is strictly smaller than exhaustive search. We also show that $f(x)

We prove that, to compute a Boolean function $f$ on $N$ variables with error probability $\epsilon$, any quantum black-box algorithm has to query at least $\frac{1 - 2\sqrt{\epsilon}}{2} \rho_f N = \frac{1 - 2\sqrt{\epsilon}}{2} \bar{S}_f$ times, where $\rho_f$ is the average influence of variables in $f$, and $\bar{S}_f$ is the average sensitivity. It's interesting to contrast this result with the known lower bound of $\Omega (\sqrt{S_f})$, where $S_f$ is the sensitivity of $f$. This lower bound is tight for some functions. We also show for any polynomial $\tilde{f}$ that approximates $f$ with error probability $\epsilon$, $deg(\tilde{f}) \ge 1/4 (1 - \frac{3 \epsilon}{1 + \epsilon})^2 \rho_f N$. This bound can be better than previous known lower bound of $\Omega(\sqrt{BS_f})$ for some functions. Our technique may be of intest itself: we apply Fourier analysis to functions mapping $\{0, 1\}^N$ to unit vectors in a Hilbert space. From this viewpoint, the state of the quantum computer at step $t$ can be written as $\sum_{s\in \{0, 1\}^N, |s| \le t} \hat{\phi}_s (-1)^ {s \cdot x}$, which is handy for lower bound analysis.

We show that the BIMATRIX game does not have a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme, unless PPAD is in P. In other words, no algorithm with time polynomial in n and 1/\epsilon can compute an \epsilon-approximate Nash equilibrium of an n by nbimatrix game, unless PPAD is in P. Instrumental to our proof, we introduce a new discrete fixed-point problem on a high-dimensional cube with a constant side-length, such as on an n-dimensional cube with side-length 7, and show that they are PPAD-complete. Furthermore, we prove, unless PPAD is in RP, that the smoothed complexity of the Lemke-Howson algorithm or any algorithm for computing a Nash equilibrium of a bimatrix game is polynomial in n and 1/\sigma under perturbations with magnitude \sigma. Our result answers a major open question in the smoothed analysis of algorithms and the approximation of Nash equilibria.

We present three results on the complexity of Minimax Approval Voting. First, we study Minimax Approval Voting parameterized by the Hamming distance $d$ from the solution to the votes. We show Minimax Approval Voting admits no algorithm running in time $\mathcal{O}^\star(2^{o(d\log d)})$, unless the Exponential Time Hypothesis (ETH) fails. This means that the $\mathcal{O}^\star(d^{2d})$ algorithm of Misra et al. [AAMAS 2015] is essentially optimal. Motivated by this, we then show a parameterized approximation scheme, running in time $\mathcal{O}^\star(\left({3}/{\epsilon}\right)^{2d})$, which is essentially tight assuming ETH. Finally, we get a new polynomial-time randomized approximation scheme for Minimax Approval Voting, which runs in time $n^{\mathcal{O}(1/\epsilon^2 \cdot \log(1/\epsilon))} \cdot \mathrm{poly}(m)$, almost matching the running time of the fastest known PTAS for Closest String due to Ma and Sun [SIAM J. Comp. 2009].

The fuzzy $K$-means problem is a generalization of the classical $K$-means problem to soft clusterings, i.e. clusterings where each points belongs to each cluster to some degree. Although popular in practice, prior to this work the fuzzy $K$-means problem has not been studied from a complexity theoretic or algorithmic perspective. We show that optimal solutions for fuzzy $K$-means cannot, in general, be expressed by radicals over the input points. Surprisingly, this already holds for very simple inputs in one-dimensional space. Hence, one cannot expect to compute optimal solutions exactly. We give the first $(1+\epsilon)$-approximation algorithms for the fuzzy $K$-means problem. First, we present a deterministic approximation algorithm whose runtime is polynomial in $N$ and linear in the dimension $D$ of the input set, given that $K$ is constant, i.e. a polynomial time approximation algorithm given a fixed $K$. We achieve this result by showing that for each soft clustering there exists a hard clustering with comparable properties. Second, by using techniques known from coreset constructions for the $K$-means problem, we develop a deterministic approximation algorithm that runs in time almost linear in $N$ but exponential in the dimension $D$. We complement these results with a randomized algorithm which imposes some natural restrictions on the input set and whose runtime is comparable to some of the most efficient approximation algorithms for $K$-means, i.e. linear in the number of points and the dimension, but exponential in the number of clusters.

An orthogonal 16-point approximate discrete cosine transform (DCT) is introduced. The proposed transform requires neither multiplications nor bit-shifting operations. A fast algorithm based on matrix factorization is introduced, requiring only 44 additions---the lowest arithmetic cost in literature. To assess the introduced transform, computational complexity, similarity with the exact DCT, and coding performance measures are computed. Classical and state-of-the-art 16-point low-complexity transforms were used in a comparative analysis. In the context of image compression, the proposed approximation was evaluated via PSNR and SSIM measurements, attaining the best cost-benefit ratio among the competitors. For video encoding, the proposed approximation was embedded into a HEVC reference software for direct comparison with the original HEVC standard. Physically realized and tested using FPGA hardware, the proposed transform showed 35% and 37% improvements of area-time and area-time-squared VLSI metrics when compared to the best competing transform in the literature.

We study the complexity of the problem DETECTION PAIR. A detection pair of a graph $G$ is a pair $(W,L)$ of sets of detectors with $W\subseteq V(G)$, the watchers, and $L\subseteq V(G)$, the listeners, such that for every pair $u,v$ of vertices that are not dominated by a watcher of $W$, there is a listener of $L$ whose distances to $u$ and to $v$ are different. The goal is to minimize $|W|+|L|$. This problem generalizes the two classic problems DOMINATING SET and METRIC DIMENSION, that correspond to the restrictions $L=\emptyset$ and $W=\emptyset$, respectively. DETECTION PAIR was recently introduced by Finbow, Hartnell and Young [A. S. Finbow, B. L. Hartnell and J. R. Young. The complexity of monitoring a network with both watchers and listeners. Manuscript, 2015], who proved it to be NP-complete on trees, a surprising result given that both DOMINATING SET and METRIC DIMENSION are known to be linear-time solvable on trees. It follows from an existing reduction by Hartung and Nichterlein for METRIC DIMENSION that even on bipartite subcubic graphs of arbitrarily large girth, DETECTION PAIR is NP-hard to approximate within a sub-logarithmic factor and W[2]-hard (when parameterized by solution size). We show, using a reduction to SET COVER, that DETECTION PAIR is approximable within a factor logarithmic in the number of vertices of the input graph. Our two main results are a linear-time $2$-approximation algorithm and an FPT algorithm for DETECTION PAIR on trees.

The low-rank matrix approximation problem with respect to the component-wise $\ell_1$-norm ($\ell_1$-LRA), which is closely related to robust principal component analysis (PCA), has become a very popular tool in data mining and machine learning. Robust PCA aims at recovering a low-rank matrix that was perturbed with sparse noise, with applications for example in foreground-background video separation. Although $\ell_1$-LRA is strongly believed to be NP-hard, there is, to the best of our knowledge, no formal proof of this fact. In this paper, we prove that $\ell_1$-LRA is NP-hard, already in the rank-one case, using a reduction from MAX CUT. Our derivations draw interesting connections between $\ell_1$-LRA and several other well-known problems, namely, robust PCA, $\ell_0$-LRA, binary matrix factorization, a particular densest bipartite subgraph problem, the computation of the cut norm of $\{-1,+1\}$ matrices, and the discrete basis problem, which we all prove to be NP-hard.

We show that the problem of finding an \epsilon-approximate Nash equilibrium of an n by n two-person games can be reduced to the computation of an (\epsilon/n)^2-approximate market equilibrium of a Leontief economy. Together with a recent result of Chen, Deng and Teng, this polynomial reduction implies that the Leontief market exchange problem does not have a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme, that is, there is no algorithm that can compute an \epsilon-approximate market equilibrium in time polynomial in m, n, and 1/\epsilon, unless PPAD is not in P, We also extend the analysis of our reduction to show, unless PPAD is not in RP, that the smoothed complexity of the Scarf's general fixed-point approximation algorithm (when applying to solve the approximate Leontief market exchange problem) or of any algorithm for computing an approximate market equilibrium of Leontief economies is not polynomial in n and 1/\sigma, under Gaussian or uniform perturbations with magnitude \sigma.