We give the first (relative) (1+ε)-approximation algorithm for the continuous optimal transport (OT) problem between two axis-aligned histograms in the plane, each of which is represented as a piecewise-constant function over a rectangular subdivision. Our algorithm runs in nearly quadratic time in the complexity of the histograms in the worst case. In contrast to the discrete and semi-discrete optimal transport problems, which always admit linear-size OT plans, we demonstrate that there is a quadratic lower bound on the complexity of even a (1+ε)-approximate OT plan in the continuous setting in the worst case. This suggests that the runtime of our approximation algorithm nearly matches the worst-case lower-bound complexity of an explicit (1+ε)-approximate OT plan between two histograms. We additionally provide near-linear time algorithms with either weaker approximation guarantees or restrictions on the input histograms.

For any given metric space, obtaining an offline optimal solution to the classical k-server problem can be reduced to solving a minimum-cost partial bipartite matching between two point sets A and B within that metric space. For d-dimensional 𝓁_p metric space, we present an Õ(min{nk, n^{2-1/(2d+1)}log Δ}⋅ Φ(n)) time algorithm for solving this instance of minimum-cost partial bipartite matching; here, Δ represents the spread of the point set, and Φ(n) is the query/update time of a d-dimensional dynamic weighted nearest neighbor data structure. Our algorithm improves upon prior algorithms that require at least Ω(nkΦ(n)) time. The design of minimum-cost (partial) bipartite matching algorithms that make sub-quadratic queries to a weighted nearest-neighbor data structure, even for bounded spread instances, is a major open problem in computational geometry. We resolve this problem at least for the instances that are generated by the offline version of the k-server problem. Our algorithm employs a hierarchical partitioning approach, dividing the points of A∪ B into rectangles. It maintains a partial minimum-cost matching where any point b ∈ B is either matched to another point a ∈ A or to the boundary of the rectangle it is located in. The algorithm involves iteratively merging pairs of rectangles by erasing the shared boundary between them and recomputing the minimum-cost partial matching. This continues until all boundaries are erased and we obtain the desired minimum-cost partial matching of A and B. We exploit geometry in our analysis to show that each point participates in only Õ(n^{1-1/(2d+1)}log Δ) number of augmenting paths, leading to a total execution time of Õ(n^{2-1/(2d+1)}Φ(n)log Δ). We also show that, for the 𝓁₁ norm and d dimensions, any algorithm that can solve instances of the offline n-server problem with an exponential spread in T(n) time can be used to compute minimum-cost bipartite matching in a complete graph defined on two (d-1)-dimensional point sets under the 𝓁₁ norm within T(n) time. This suggests that removing spread from the execution time of our algorithm may be difficult as it immediately results in a sub-quadratic algorithm for bipartite matching under the 𝓁₁ norm.

The $p$-Wasserstein distance measures the cost of optimally transporting one distribution to another, where the cost of moving a unit mass from $a$ to $b$ is the $p^{th}$ power of the ground distance $\mathrm{d}(a,b)$ between them. Despite its strong theoretical properties, its use in practice -- especially for $p \ge 2$ -- is limited due to two key challenges: sensitivity to noise and a lack of scalable algorithms. We identify noise sensitivity as a key reason why some existing approximation algorithms for $p=1$ fail to generalize to $p \ge 2$ and then present new algorithms for approximating the $p$-Wasserstein distance and its variant. First, when $\mathrm{d}(\cdot,\cdot)$ is a metric, for any constant $p \ge 2$, we present a novel relative $O(\log n)$-approximation algorithm to compute the $p$-Wasserstein distance between any two discrete distributions of size $n$. The algorithm runs in $O(n^2 \log U\log \Delta\log n)$ time, where $\log U$ is the bit-length of the input probabilities and $\Delta$ is the ratio of the largest to the smallest pairwise distance. We use $p$ hierarchically well-separated trees to define a distance that approximates the $p$-Wasserstein cost within a factor of $O(\log n)$ and then present a simple primal-dual algorithm to compute the $p$-Wasserstein cost with respect to this distance. Second, due to the noise sensitivity of the $p$-Wasserstein distance, we show that existing combinatorial approaches require $\Omega(n^2/\delta^p)$ time to approximate the $p$-Wasserstein distance within an additive error of $\delta$. In contrast, we show that, for any arbitrary distance $\mathrm{d}(\cdot,\cdot)$, a recent noise-resistant variant of the $p$-Wasserstein distance, called the $p$-RPW distance, can be approximated in $O(n^2/\delta^3)$ time.

The sensitivity of optimal transport (OT) to noise has motivated the study of robust variants. In this paper, we study two such formulations of semi-discrete OT in $\mathbb{R}^d$: (i) the $\alpha$-optimal partial transport, which minimizes the cost of transporting a mass of $\alpha$; and (ii) the $\lambda$-robust optimal transport, which regularizes the OT problem using the total variation (TV) distance. First, we provide a novel characterization of the optimal solutions in these settings, showing they can be represented as a restricted Laguerre diagram. Second, we exploit this characterization to establish a strong algorithmic connection between the two problems, showing that any solver for one can be adapted to solve the other with comparable precision. Third, we overcome key challenges posed in extending the cost-scaling paradigm to compute these variants of OT and present an algorithm that computes the exact solution up to $\log (1/\varepsilon)$ bits of precision in $n^{O(d)}\log (1/\varepsilon)$ time, where $n$ is the support size of the discrete distribution. Finally, we present an $n^{1+o(1)}\varepsilon^{-O(d)}$ time approximation algorithm for the above variants of OT.

Given a set of probability distributions, the Wasserstein barycenter problem asks to compute a distribution that minimizes the average Wasserstein distance, or optimal transport cost, from all the input distributions. Wasserstein barycenters preserve common geometric features of the input distributions, making them useful in machine learning and data analytics tasks.

The $2$-Wasserstein distance is sensitive to minor geometric differences between distributions, making it a very powerful dissimilarity metric. However, due to this sensitivity, a small outlier mass can also cause a significant increase in the $2$-Wasserstein distance between two similar distributions. Similarly, sampling discrepancy can cause the empirical $2$-Wasserstein distance on $n$ samples in $\mathbb{R}^2$ to converge to the true distance at a rate of $n^{-1/4}$, which is significantly slower than the rate of $n^{-1/2}$ for $1$-Wasserstein distance. We introduce a new family of distances parameterized by $k \ge 0$, called $k$-RPW that is based on computing the partial $2$-Wasserstein distance. We show that (1) $k$-RPW satisfies the metric properties, (2) $k$-RPW is robust to small outlier mass while retaining the sensitivity of $2$-Wasserstein distance to minor geometric differences, and (3) when $k$ is a constant, $k$-RPW distance between empirical distributions on $n$ samples in $\mathbb{R}^2$ converges to the true distance at a rate of $n^{-1/3}$, which is faster than the convergence rate of $n^{-1/4}$ for the $2$-Wasserstein distance. Using the partial $p$-Wasserstein distance, we extend our distance to any $p \in [1,\infty]$. By setting parameters $k$ or $p$ appropriately, we can reduce our distance to the total variation, $p$-Wasserstein, and the Lévy-Prokhorov distances. Experiments show that our distance function achieves higher accuracy in comparison to the $1$-Wasserstein, $2$-Wasserstein, and TV distances for image retrieval tasks on noisy real-world data sets.

Optimal Transport (OT, also known as the Wasserstein distance) is a popular metric for comparing probability distributions and has been successfully used in many machine-learning applications. In the semi-discrete $2$-Wasserstein problem, we wish to compute the cheapest way to transport all the mass from a continuous distribution $\mu$ to a discrete distribution $\nu$ in $\mathbb{R}^d$ for $d\ge 1$, where the cost of transporting unit mass between points $a$ and $b$ is $d(a,b)=||a-b||^2$. When both distributions are discrete, a simple combinatorial framework has been used to find the exact solution (see e.g. [Orlin, STOC 1988]). In this paper, we propose a combinatorial framework for the semi-discrete OT, which can be viewed as an extension of the combinatorial framework for the discrete OT but requires several new ideas. We present a new algorithm that given $\mu$ and $\nu$ in $\mathbb{R}^2$ and a parameter $\varepsilon>0$, computes an $\varepsilon$-additive approximate semi-discrete transport plan in $O(n^{4}\log n\log \frac{1}{\varepsilon})$ time (in the worst case), where $n$ is the support-size of the discrete distribution $\nu$ and we assume that the mass of $\mu$ inside a triangle can be computed in $O(1)$ time. Our algorithm is significantly faster than the known algorithms, and unlike many numerical algorithms, it does not make any assumptions on the smoothness of $\mu$. As an application of our algorithm, we describe a data structure to store a large discrete distribution $\mu$ (with support size $N$) using $O(N)$ space so that, given a query discrete distribution $\nu$ (with support size $k$), an $\varepsilon$-additive approximate transport plan can be computed in $O(k^{3}\sqrt{N}\log \frac{1}{\varepsilon})$ time in $2$ dimensions. Our algorithm and data structure extend to higher dimensions as well as to $p$-Wasserstein problem for any $p \ge 1$.

Given a d-dimensional continuous (resp. discrete) probability distribution μ and a discrete distribution ν, the semi-discrete (resp. discrete) optimal transport (OT) problem asks for computing a minimum-cost plan to transport mass from μ to ν; we assume n to be the number of points in the support of the discrete distributions. In this paper, we present three approximation algorithms for the OT problem with strong provable guarantees.

Algorithms for the minimum-cost bipartite matching can be used to estimate Wasserstein distance between two distributions. Given two sets $A$ and $B$ of $n$ points in a $2$-dimensional Euclidean space, one can use a fast implementation of the Hungarian method to compute a minimum-cost bipartite matching of $A$ and $B$ in $\tilde{O}(n^2)$ time. Let $\Delta$ be the spread, i.e., the ratio of the distance of the farthest to the closest pair of points in $A\cup B$. In this paper, we present a new algorithm to compute a minimum-cost bipartite matching of $A$ and $B$ with a similar worst-case execution time of $\tilde{O}(n^2 \log \Delta)$. However, when $A$ and $B$ are drawn independently and identically from a fixed distribution that is not known to the algorithm, the execution time of our algorithm is, in expectation, $\tilde{O}(n^{7/4}\log \Delta)$. To the best of our knowledge, our algorithm is the first one to achieve a sub-quadratic execution time even for stochastic point sets with real-valued coordinates. Our algorithm extends to any dimension $d$, where it runs in $\tilde{O}(n^{2-\frac{1}{2d}}\Phi(n))$ time for stochastic point sets $A$ and $B$; here $\Phi(n)$ is the query/update time of a dynamic weighted nearest neighbor data structure. Our algorithm can be seen as a careful adaptation of the Hungarian method in the geometric divide-and-conquer framework.

Optimal Transport is a popular distance metric for measuring similarity between distributions. Exact and approximate combinatorial algorithms for computing the optimal transport distance are hard to parallelize. This has motivated the development of numerical solvers (e.g. Sinkhorn method) that can exploit GPU parallelism and produce approximate solutions. We introduce the first parallel combinatorial algorithm to find an additive $\varepsilon$-approximation of the OT distance. The parallel complexity of our algorithm is $O(\log(n)/ \varepsilon^2)$ where $n$ is the total support size for the input distributions. In Massive Parallel Computation (MPC) frameworks such as Hadoop and MapReduce, our algorithm computes an $\varepsilon$-approximate transport plan in $O(\log (\log (n/\varepsilon))/\varepsilon^2)$ rounds with $O(n/\varepsilon)$ space per machine; all prior algorithms in the MPC framework take $\Omega(\log n)$ rounds. We also provide a GPU-friendly matrix-based interpretation of our algorithm where each step of the algorithm is row or column manipulation of the matrix. Experiments suggest that our combinatorial algorithm is faster than the state-of-the-art approximate solvers in the GPU, especially for higher values of $n$.

Given two point sets A and B in ℝd of size n each, for some constant dimension d≥ 1, and a parameter ε>0, we present a deterministic algorithm that computes, in n·(ε−1 logn)O(d) time, a perfect matching between A and B whose cost is within a (1+ε) factor of the optimal matching under any ℓp-norm. Although a Monte-Carlo algorithm with a similar running time is proposed by Raghvendra and Agarwal [J. ACM 2020], the best-known deterministic ε-approximation algorithm takes Ω(n3/2) time. Our algorithm constructs a (refinement of a) tree cover of ℝd, and we develop several new tools to apply a tree-cover based approach to compute an ε-approximate perfect matching.

Maximum cardinality bipartite matching is an important graph optimization problem with several applications. For instance, maximum cardinality matching in a $\delta$-disc graph can be used in the computation of the bottleneck matching as well as the $\infty$-Wasserstein and the Lévy-Prokhorov distances between probability distributions. For any point sets $A, B \subset \mathbb{R}^2$, the $\delta$-disc graph is a bipartite graph formed by connecting every pair of points $(a,b) \in A\times B$ by an edge if the Euclidean distance between them is at most $\delta$. Using the classical Hopcroft-Karp algorithm, a maximum-cardinality matching on any $\delta$-disc graph can be found in $\tilde{O}(n^{3/2})$ time.~\footnote{We use $\tilde{O}(\cdot)$ to suppress poly-logarithmic terms in the complexity.} In this paper, we present a simplification of a recent algorithm (Lahn and Raghvendra, JoCG 2021) for the maximum cardinality matching problem and describe how a maximum cardinality matching in a $\delta$-disc graph can be computed asymptotically faster than $O(n^{3/2})$ time for any moderately dense point set. As applications, we show that if $A$ and $B$ are point sets drawn uniformly at random from a unit square, an exact bottleneck matching can be computed in $\tilde{O}(n^{4/3})$ time. On the other hand, experiments suggest that the Hopcroft-Karp algorithm seems to take roughly $\Theta (n^{3/2})$ time for this case. This translates to substantial improvements in execution time for larger inputs.

The 2-Wasserstein distance (or RMS distance) is a useful measure of similarity between probability distributions with exciting applications in machine learning. For discrete distributions, the problem of computing this distance can be expressed in terms of finding a minimum-cost perfect matching on a complete bipartite graph given by two multisets of points A, B ⊂ ℝ2, with |A| = |B| = n, where the ground distance between any two points is the squared Euclidean distance between them. Although there is a near-linear time relative ∊-approximation algorithm for the case where the ground distance is Euclidean (Sharathkumar and Agarwal, JACM 2020), all existing relative ∊-approximation algorithms for the RMS distance take Ω(n3/2) time. This is primarily because, unlike Euclidean distance, squared Euclidean distance is not a metric. In this paper, for the RMS distance, we present a new ∊-approximation algorithm that runs in O(n5/4 poly{log n, 1/∊}) time. Our algorithm is inspired by a recent approach for finding a minimum-cost perfect matching in bipartite planar graphs (Asathulla et al, TALG 2020). Their algorithm depends heavily on the existence of sublinear sized vertex separators as well as shortest path data structures that require planarity. Surprisingly, we are able to design a similar algorithm for a complete geometric graph that is far from planar and does not have any vertex separators. Central components of our algorithm include a quadtree-based distance that approximates the squared Euclidean distance and a data structure that supports both Hungarian search and augmentation in sublinear time.

For point sets A , B ⊂ R d , ∣ A ∣ = ∣ B ∣ = n , and for a parameter ε > 0, we present a Monte Carlo algorithm that computes, in O ( n poly(log n , 1/ε)) time, an ε-approximate perfect matching of A and B under any L p -norm with high probability; the previously best-known algorithm takes Ω( n 3/2 ) time. We approximate the L p -norm using a distance function, d(⋅, ⋅) based on a randomly shifted quad-tree. The algorithm iteratively generates an approximate minimum-cost augmenting path under d(⋅, ⋅) in time proportional, within a polylogarithmic factor, to the length of the path. We show that the total length of the augmenting paths generated by the algorithm is O ( n /ε)log n ), implying that the running time of our algorithm is O ( n poly(log n , 1/ε)).

Given a weighted planar bipartite graph G ( A ∪ B , E ) where each edge has an integer edge cost, we give an Õ( n 4/3 log nC ) time algorithm to compute minimum-cost perfect matching; here C is the maximum edge cost in the graph. The previous best-known planarity exploiting algorithm has a running time of O ( n 3/2 log n ) and is achieved by using planar separators (Lipton and Tarjan ’80). Our algorithm is based on the bit-scaling paradigm (Gabow and Tarjan ’89). For each scale, our algorithm first executes O ( n 1/3 ) iterations of Gabow and Tarjan’s algorithm in O ( n 4/3 ) time leaving only O ( n 2/3 ) vertices unmatched. Next, it constructs a compressed residual graph H with O ( n 2/3 ) vertices and O ( n ) edges. This is achieved by using an r -division of the planar graph G with r = n 2/3 . For each partition of the r -division, there is an edge between two vertices of H if and only if they are connected by a directed path inside the partition. Using existing efficient shortest-path data structures, the remaining O ( n 2/3 ) vertices are matched by iteratively computing a minimum-cost augmenting path, each taking Õ( n 2/3 ) time. Augmentation changes the residual graph, so the algorithm updates the compressed representation for each partition affected by the change in Õ( n 2/3 ) time. We bound the total number of affected partitions over all the augmenting paths by O ( n 2/3 log n ). Therefore, the total time taken by the algorithm is Õ( n 4/3 ).

We present a weighted approach to compute a maximum cardinality matching in an arbitrary bipartite graph. Our main result is a new algorithm that takes as input a weighted bipartite graph $G(A\cup B,E)$ with edge weights of $0$ or $1$. Let $w \leq n$ be an upper bound on the weight of any matching in $G$. Consider the subgraph induced by all the edges of $G$ with a weight $0$. Suppose every connected component in this subgraph has $\mathcal{O}(r)$ vertices and $\mathcal{O}(mr/n)$ edges. We present an algorithm to compute a maximum cardinality matching in $G$ in $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}( m(\sqrt{w}+ \sqrt{r}+\frac{wr}{n}))$ time. When all the edge weights are $1$ (symmetrically when all weights are $0$), our algorithm will be identical to the well-known Hopcroft-Karp (HK) algorithm, which runs in $\mathcal{O}(m\sqrt{n})$ time. However, if we can carefully assign weights of $0$ and $1$ on its edges such that both $w$ and $r$ are sub-linear in $n$ and $wr=\mathcal{O}(n^γ)$ for $γ< 3/2$, then we can compute maximum cardinality matching in $G$ in $o(m\sqrt{n})$ time. Using our algorithm, we obtain a new $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(n^{4/3}/\varepsilon^4)$ time algorithm to compute an $\varepsilon$-approximate bottleneck matching of $A,B\subset\mathbb{R}^2$ and an $\frac{1}{\varepsilon^{\mathcal{O}(d)}}n^{1+\frac{d-1}{2d-1}}\mathrm{poly}\log n$ time algorithm for computing $\varepsilon$-approximate bottleneck matching in $d$-dimensions. All previous algorithms take $Ω(n^{3/2})$ time. Given any graph $G(A \cup B,E)$ that has an easily computable balanced vertex separator for every subgraph $G'(V',E')$ of size $|V'|^δ$, for $δ\in [1/2,1)$, we can apply our algorithm to compute a maximum matching in $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(mn^{\fracδ{1+δ}})$ time improving upon the $\mathcal{O}(m\sqrt{n})$ time taken by the HK-Algorithm.

Transportation cost is an attractive similarity measure between probability distributions due to its many useful theoretical properties. However, solving optimal transport exactly can be prohibitively expensive. Therefore, there has been significant effort towards the design of scalable approximation algorithms. Previous combinatorial results [Sharathkumar, Agarwal STOC '12, Agarwal, Sharathkumar STOC '14] have focused primarily on the design of near-linear time multiplicative approximation algorithms. There has also been an effort to design approximate solutions with additive errors [Cuturi NIPS '13, Altschuler \etal\ NIPS '17, Dvurechensky \etal\, ICML '18, Quanrud, SOSA '19] within a time bound that is linear in the size of the cost matrix and polynomial in $C/\delta$; here $C$ is the largest value in the cost matrix and $\delta$ is the additive error. We present an adaptation of the classical graph algorithm of Gabow and Tarjan and provide a novel analysis of this algorithm that bounds its execution time by $\BigO(\frac{n^2 C}{\delta}+ \frac{nC^2}{\delta^2})$. Our algorithm is extremely simple and executes, for an arbitrarily small constant $\eps$, only $\lfloor \frac{2C}{(1-\eps)\delta}\rfloor + 1$ iterations, where each iteration consists only of a Dijkstra-type search followed by a depth-first search. We also provide empirical results that suggest our algorithm is competitive with respect to a sequential implementation of the Sinkhorn algorithm in execution time. Moreover, our algorithm quickly computes a solution for very small values of $\delta$ whereas Sinkhorn algorithm slows down due to numerical instability.

Čech complexes are useful simplicial complexes for computing and analyzing topological features of data that lies in Euclidean space. Unfortunately, computing these complexes becomes prohibitively expensive for large-sized data sets even for medium-to-low dimensional data. We present an approximation scheme for (1 + ε)-approximating the topological information of the Čech complexes for n points in ℝd, for ε ∊ (0, 1]. Our approximation has a total size of for constant dimension d, improving all the currently available (1 + ε)-approximation schemes of simplicial filtrations in Euclidean space. Perhaps counter-intuitively, we arrive at our result by adding additional sample points to the input. We achieve a bound that is independent of the spread of the point set by pre-identifying the scales at which the Čech complexes changes and sampling accordingly.

We give an Õ(n7/5 log(nC)) time1 algorithm to compute a minimum-cost maximum cardinality matching (optimal matching) in Kh-minor free graphs with h = O(1) and integer edge weights having magnitude at most C. This improves upon the Õ(n10/7 log C) algorithm of Cohen et al‥ [SODA 2017] and the O(n3/2 log(nC)) algorithm of Gabow and Tarjan [SIAM J. Comput. 1989]. For a graph with m edges and n vertices, the well-known Hungarian Algorithm computes a shortest augmenting path in each phase in O(m) time, yielding an optimal matching in O(mn) time. The Gabow-Tarjan [SIAM J. Comput. 1989] algorithm computes, in each phase, a maximal set of vertex-disjoint shortest augmenting paths (for appropriately defined costs) in O(m) time. This reduces the number of phases from n to and the total execution time to . To obtain our speed-up, we relax the conditions on the augmenting paths and iteratively compute, in each phase, a set of carefully selected augmenting paths that are not restricted to be shortest or vertex-disjoint. As a result, our algorithm computes substantially more augmenting paths in each phase, reducing the number of phases from to O(n2/5). By using small vertex separators, the execution of each phase takes Õ(m) time on average. For planar graphs, we combine our algorithm with efficient shortest path data structures to obtain a minimum-cost perfect matching in Õ(n6/5 log (nC)) time. This improves upon the recent Õ(n4/3 log (nC)) time algorithm by Asathulla et al. [SODA 2018].

Classical methods to model topological properties of point clouds, such as the Vietoris–Rips complex, suffer from the combinatorial explosion of complex sizes. We propose a novel technique to approximate a multi-scale filtration of the Rips complex with improved bounds for size: precisely, for n points in $$\mathbb {R}^d$$ , we obtain a O(d)-approximation whose k-skeleton has size $$n2^{O(d \log k)}$$ per scale and $$n2^{O(d\log d)}$$ in total over all scales. In conjunction with dimension reduction techniques, our approach yields a $$O(\mathrm {polylog} (n))$$ -approximation of size $$n^{O(1)}$$ for Rips filtrations on arbitrary metric spaces. This result stems from high-dimensional lattice geometry and exploits properties of the permutahedral lattice, a well-studied structure in discrete geometry. Building on the same geometric concept, we also present a lower bound result on the size of an approximation: we construct a point set for which every $$(1+\varepsilon )$$ -approximation of the Čech filtration has to contain $$n^{\Omega (\log \log n)}$$ features, provided that $$\varepsilon <\frac{1}{\log ^{1+c} n}$$ for $$c\in (0,1)$$ .

In the online metric bipartite matching problem, we are given a set S of server locations in a metric space. Requests arrive one at a time, and on its arrival, we need to immediately and irrevocably match it to a server at a cost which is equal to the distance between these locations. A alpha-competitive algorithm will assign requests to servers so that the total cost is at most alpha times the cost of M_{Opt} where M_{Opt} is the minimum cost matching between S and R. We consider this problem in the adversarial model for the case where S and R are points on a line and |S|=|R|=n. We improve the analysis of the deterministic Robust Matching Algorithm (RM-Algorithm, Nayyar and Raghvendra FOCS'17) from O(log^2 n) to an optimal Theta(log n). Previously, only a randomized algorithm under a weaker oblivious adversary achieved a competitive ratio of O(log n) (Gupta and Lewi, ICALP'12). The well-known Work Function Algorithm (WFA) has a competitive ratio of O(n) and Omega(log n) for this problem. Therefore, WFA cannot achieve an asymptotically better competitive ratio than the RM-Algorithm.

Given a weighted planar bipartite graph G(A ∪ B, E) where each edge has a positive integer edge cost, we give an Õ(n4/3 log nC) time algorithm to compute minimum-cost perfect matching; here C is the maximum edge cost in the graph. The previous best known planarity exploiting algorithm has a running time of O(n3/2 log n) and is achieved by using planar separators (Lipton and Tarjan ’80). Our algorithm is based on the bit-scaling paradigm (Gabow and Tarjan ’89). For each scale, our algorithm first executes O(n1/3) iterations of Gabow and Tarjan's algorithm in O(n4/3) time leaving only O(n2/3) vertices unmatched. Next, it constructs a compressed residual graph H with O(n2/3) vertices and O(n) edges. This is achieved by using an r-division of the planar graph G with r = n2/3. For each partition of the r-division, there is an edge between two vertices of H if and only if they are connected by a directed path inside the partition. Using existing efficient shortest-path data structures, the remaining O(n2/3) vertices are matched by iteratively computing a minimum-cost augmenting path each taking Õ(n2/3) time. Augmentation changes the residual graph, so the algorithm updates the compressed representation for each affected partition in O(n2/3) time. We bound the total number of affected partitions over all the augmenting paths by O(n2/3 log n). Therefore, the total time taken by the algorithm is Õ(n4/3).

Given a set of n points on a plane, in the Minimum Weight Triangulation problem, we wish to find a triangulation that minimizes the sum of Euclidean length of its edges. This incredibly challenging problem has been studied for more than four decades and has been only recently shown to be NP-Hard. In this paper we present a novel polynomial-time algorithm that computes an expected 14-approximation of the minimum weight triangulation—a constant that is significantly smaller than what has been previously known. For every integer q ≥ 1, we also show that our triangulation is simultaneously a 14-approximation of a triangulation that minimizes the q-norm of its edge costs, i.e., the sum of qth powers of all its edges. In our algorithm, we use grids to partition the edges into levels where shorter edges appear at smaller levels and edges with similar lengths appear at the same level. We then triangulate the point set incrementally by introducing edges in increasing order of their levels. We introduce the edges of any level i + 1 in two steps. In the first step, we partition the boundary of any non-triangulated face into reflex chains and add edges between successive chains using a variant of the well-known ring heuristic to generate a partial triangulation Âi. In the second step, we greedily add non-intersecting level i + 1 edges to Âi in increasing order of their length and obtain a partial triangulation Âi+1. The ring heuristic is known to yield only an

Rips complexes are important structures for analyzing topological features of metric spaces. Unfortunately, generating these complexes constitutes an expensive task because of a combinatorial explosion in the complex size. For n points in R^d, we present a scheme to construct a 4.24-approximation of the multi-scale filtration of the Rips complex in the L-infinity metric, which extends to a O(d^{0.25})-approximation of the Rips filtration for the Euclidean case. The k-skeleton of the resulting approximation has a total size of n2^{O(d log k)}. The scheme is based on the integer lattice and on the barycentric subdivision of the d-cube.

We present a novel input sensitive analysis of a deterministic online algorithm [1] for the minimum metric bipartite matching problem. We show that, in the adversarial model, for any metric space M and a set of n servers S, the competitive ratio of this algorithm is O(μM(S) log2n); here μM(S) is the maximum ratio of the traveling salesman tour and the diameter of any subset of S. It is straight-forward to show that any algorithm, even with complete knowledge of M and S, will have a competitive ratio of Ω(μM(S)). So, the performance of this algorithm is sensitive to the input and near-optimal for any given S and M. As consequences, we also achieve the following results: 1) If S is a set of points on a line, then μM(S) = Θ(1) and the competitive ratio is O(log2n), and, 2) If S is a set of points spanning a subspace with doubling dimension d, then μM(S) = O(n1-1/d) and the competitive ratio is O(n1-1/dlog2n). Prior to this result, the previous best-known algorithm for the line metric has a competitive ratio of O(n0.59) and requires both S and the request set R to be on a line. There is also an O(log n) competitive algorithm in the weaker oblivious adversary model. To obtain our results, we partition the requests into well-separated clusters and replace each cluster with a small and a large weighted ball; the weight of a ball is the number of requests in the cluster. We show that the cost of the online matching can be expressed as the sum of the weight times radius of the smaller balls. We also show that the cost of edges of the optimal matching inside each larger ball can be shown to be proportional to the weight times the radius of the larger ball. We then use a simple variant of the well-known Vitali's covering lemma to relate the radii of these balls and obtain the competitive ratio.

We study the Online Minimum Metric Bipartite Matching Problem. In this problem, we are given point sets S and R which correspond to the server and request locations; here |S|=|R|=n. All these locations are points from some metric space and the cost of matching a server to a request is given by the distance between their locations in this space. In this problem, the request points arrive one at a time. When a request arrives, we must immediately and irrevocably match it to a "free" server. The matching obtained after all the requests are processed is the online matching M. The cost of M is the sum of the cost of its edges. The performance of any online algorithm is the worst-case ratio of the cost of its online solution M to the minimum-cost matching. We present a deterministic online algorithm for this problem. Our algorithm is the first to simultaneously achieve optimal performances in the well-known adversarial and the random arrival models. For the adversarial model, we obtain a competitive ratio of 2n-1 + o(1); it is known that no deterministic algorithm can do better than 2n-1. In the random arrival model, our algorithm obtains a competitive ratio of 2H_n - 1 + o(1); where H_n is the n-th Harmonic number. We also prove that any online algorithm will have a competitive ratio of at least 2H_n - 1-o(1) in this model. We use a new variation of the offline primal-dual method for computing minimum cost matching to compute the online matching. Our primal-dual method is based on a relaxed linear-program. Under metric costs, this specific relaxation helps us relate the cost of the online matching with the offline matching leading to its robust properties.

Recent work has highlighted credit networks as an effective mechanism for modeling trust in a network: agents issue their own currency and trust each other for a certain amount of each other's currency, allowing two nodes to transact if there is a chain of sufficient residual trust between them. Under a natural model of repeated transactions, the probability that two agents can successfully transact in a credit network (i.e. the liquidity between these two agents) is the same as the probability that they are connected to each other in a uniformly random forest of the network. Motivated by this connection, we define the RF-connectivity between a pair of nodes in a graph G as the probability that the two nodes belong to the same connected component in a uniformly random forest of G. Our first result is that for an arbitrary subset S of nodes in G, the average RF-connectivity between pairs of nodes in S is at least 1–2/h(GS), where h(GS) is the edge expansion of the subgraph GS induced by S. Informally, this implies that a well-connected “community” of nodes S in a credit network will have high liquidity among themselves, regardless of the structure of the remaining network. We extend this result to show that in fact every node in S has good average RF-connectivity to other nodes in S whenever S has good edge expansion. We also show that our results are nearly tight by proving an upper bound on the liquidity of regular graphs. For our motivating application, it is important that we relate the average RF-connectivity in S to the expansion inside S and not merely to expansion of G since we would like to assert that a well-connected community has high liquidity even if the graph as a whole is not well-connected. This naturally leads to a monotonicity conjecture: the RF-connectivity of two nodes can not decrease when a new edge is added to G. We show that the monotonicity conjecture is equivalent to showing negative correlation between inclusion of any two edges in a random forest, a long-standing open problem. Our result about the average RF-connectivity of nodes in S may be viewed as establishing a weak version of the monotonicity conjecture.

Let G = G(A∪B,A×B), with |A| = |B| = n, be a weighted bipartite graph, and let d(·,·) be the cost function on the edges. Let w(M) denote the weight of a matching in G, and M* a minimum-cost perfect matching in G. We call a perfect matching M c-approximate, for c ≥ 1, if w(M) ≤ c · w(M*). We present three approximation algorithms for computing minimum-cost perfect matchings in G.

Let A, B ∈ [Δ]2, |A|=|B|=n, be point sets where each point has a positive integer coordinate bounded by Δ. For an arbitrary small constant δ > 0, we design an algorithm to compute a minimum-cost Euclidean bipartite matching of A,B in O(n{3/2+δlog (nΔ)) time; all previous exact algorithms for the Euclidean bipartite matching, even when the point sets have bounded integer coordinates take Ω(n2) time.

For A, B ⊂ ℝd, |A| + |B| = n, let a ∊ A have a demand da ∊ ℤ+ and b ∊ B have a supply sb ∊ ℤ+, σa ∊ A da = σb ∊ B sb = U and let d(·, ·) be a distance function. Suppose the diameter of A ∪ B is Δ under d(·, ·), and ε > 0 is a parameter. We present an algorithm that in O((n√U log2 n + U log U) Φ (n) log(ΔU/ε)) time computes a solution to the transportation problem on A, B which is within an additive error ε from the optimal solution. Here Φ(n) is the query and update time of a dynamic weighted nearest neighbor data structure under distance function d(·, ·). Note that the (1/ε) appears only in the log term. As among various consequences we obtain, For A, B ⊂ ℝd and for the case where d(·, ·) is a metric, an ε-approximation algorithm for the transportation problem in O((n √log2 n + U log U) Φ(n) log (U/ε)) time. For A, B ⊂ [Δ]d and the L1 and L∞ distance, exact algorithm for computing an optimal bipartite matching of A, B that runs in O(n3/2 logd + Q(1) n log Δ) time. For A, B ⊂ [Δ]2 and RMS distance, exact algorithm for computing an optimal bipartite matching of A, B that runs in O(n3/2 + δ log Δ) time, for an arbitrarily small constant δ > 0. For point sets, A, B ⊂ [Δ], for the Lp norm and for 0 < α, β < 1, we present a randomized dynamic data structure that maintains a partial solution to the transportation problem under insertions and deletions of points in which at least (1 − α)U of the demands are satisfied and whose cost is within (1 + β) of that of the optimal (complete) solution to the transportation problem with high probability. The insertion, deletion and update times are O(poly(log(nΔ)/αβ)), provided U = nO(1).

For point sets A,B ⊂ Rd, |A|=|B|=n, and for a parameter ε > 0, we present an algorithm that computes, in O(n poly(log n, 1/ε)) time, an ε-approximate perfect matching of A and B with high probability; the previously best known algorithm takes Ω(n3/2) time. We approximate the Lp-norm using a distance function, d(•,•) based on a randomly shifted quad-tree. The algorithm iteratively generates an approximate minimum-cost augmenting path under d(•,•) in time proportional to the length of the path. We show that the total length of the augmenting paths generated by the algorithm is O((n/ε)log n), implying that the running time of our algorithm is O(n poly(log n,1/ε)).

We develop (single-pass) streaming algorithms for maintaining extent measures of a stream S of n points in ℝd. We focus on designing streaming algorithms whose working space is polynomial in d (poly(d)) and sub-linear in n. For the problems of computing diameter, width and minimum enclosing ball of S, we obtain lower bounds on the worst-case approximation ratio of any streaming algorithm that uses poly(d) space. On the positive side, we introduce the notion of blurred ball cover and use it for answering approximate farthest-point queries and maintaining approximate minimum enclosing ball and diameter of S. We describe a streaming algorithm for maintaining a blurred ball cover whose working space is linear in d and independent of n.

We develop algorithms and data structures for the approximate Euclidean shortest path problem amid a set P of k convex obstacles in R 2 and R 3 , with a total of n faces.The running time of our algorithms is linear in n, and the size and query time of our data structure are independent of n.We follow a "core-set" based approach, i.e., we quickly compute a small sketch Q of P whose size is independent of n and then compute approximate shortest paths with respect to Q.