arXiv subjects

Vincent Froese

Publications and source records attributed to Vincent Froese.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Advancing Through Terrains

We study terrain visibility graphs, a well-known graph class closely related to polygon visibility graphs in computational geometry, for which a precise graph-theoretical characterization is still unknown. Over the last decade, terrain visibility graphs attracted attention in the context of time series analysis with various practical applications in areas such as physics, geography and medical sciences. We make progress in understanding terrain visibility graphs by providing several graph-theoretic results. For example, we show that they cannot contain antiholes of size larger than five. Moreover, we obtain two algorithmic results. We devise a fast output-sensitive shortest path algorithm on terrain-like graphs and a polynomial-time algorithm for \textsc{Dominating Set} on special terrain visibility graphs (called funnel visibility graphs).

cs.CG↗

arXiv2020

Comparing Temporal Graphs Using Dynamic Time Warping

Within many real-world networks the links between pairs of nodes change over time. Thus, there has been a recent boom in studying temporal graphs. Recognizing patterns in temporal graphs requires a proximity measure to compare different temporal graphs. To this end, we propose to study dynamic time warping on temporal graphs. We define the dynamic temporal graph warping distance (dtgw) to determine the dissimilarity of two temporal graphs. Our novel measure is flexible and can be applied in various application domains. We show that computing the dtgw-distance is a challenging (in general) NP-hard optimization problem and identify some polynomial-time solvable special cases. Moreover, we develop a quadratic programming formulation and an efficient heuristic. In experiments on real-word data we show that the heuristic performs very well and that our dtgw-distance performs favorably in de-anonymizing networks compared to other approaches.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Fast Exact Dynamic Time Warping on Run-Length Encoded Time Series

Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) is a well-known similarity measure for time series. The standard dynamic programming approach to compute the DTW distance of two length-$n$ time series, however, requires~$O(n^2)$ time, which is often too slow for real-world applications. Therefore, many heuristics have been proposed to speed up the DTW computation. These are often based on lower bounding techniques, approximating the DTW distance, or considering special input data such as binary or piecewise constant time series. In this paper, we present a first exact algorithm to compute the DTW distance of two run-length encoded time series whose running time only depends on the encoding lengths of the inputs. The worst-case running time is cubic in the encoding length. In experiments we show that our algorithm is indeed fast for time series with short encoding lengths.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2020

An Average-Compress Algorithm for the Sample Mean Problem under Dynamic Time Warping

Computing a sample mean of time series under dynamic time warping (DTW) is NP-hard. Consequently, there is an ongoing research effort to devise efficient heuristics. The majority of heuristics have been developed for the constrained sample mean problem that assumes a solution of predefined length. In contrast, research on the unconstrained sample mean problem is underdeveloped. In this article, we propose a generic average-compress (AC) algorithm for solving the unconstrained problem. The algorithm alternates between averaging (A-step) and compression (C-step). The A-step takes an initial guess as input and returns an approximation of a sample mean. Then the C-step reduces the length of the approximate solution. The compressed approximation serves as initial guess of the A-step in the next iteration. The purpose of the C-step is to direct the algorithm to more promising solutions of shorter length. The proposed algorithm is generic in the sense that any averaging and any compression method can be used. Experimental results show that the AC algorithm substantially outperforms current state-of-the-art algorithms for time series averaging.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2020

Parameterized Algorithms for Matrix Completion With Radius Constraints

Considering matrices with missing entries, we study NP-hard matrix completion problems where the resulting completed matrix shall have limited (local) radius. In the pure radius version, this means that the goal is to fill in the entries such that there exists a 'center string' which has Hamming distance to all matrix rows as small as possible. In stringology, this problem is also known as Closest String with Wildcards. In the local radius version, the requested center string must be one of the rows of the completed matrix. Hermelin and Rozenberg [CPM 2014, TCS 2016] performed parameterized complexity studies for Closest String with Wildcards. We answer one of their open questions, fix a bug concerning a fixed-parameter tractability result in their work, and improve some upper running time bounds. For the local radius case, we reveal a computational complexity dichotomy. In general, our results indicate that, although being NP-hard as well, this variant often allows for faster (fixed-parameter) algorithms.

cs.DM↗

arXiv2020

Faster Binary Mean Computation Under Dynamic Time Warping

Many consensus string problems are based on Hamming distance. We replace Hamming distance by the more flexible (e.g., easily coping with different input string lengths) dynamic time warping distance, best known from applications in time series mining. Doing so, we study the problem of finding a mean string that minimizes the sum of (squared) dynamic time warping distances to a given set of input strings. While this problem is known to be NP-hard (even for strings over a three-element alphabet), we address the binary alphabet case which is known to be polynomial-time solvable. We significantly improve on a previously known algorithm in terms of worst-case running time. Moreover, we also show the practical usefulness of one of our algorithms in experiments with real-world and synthetic data. Finally, we identify special cases solvable in linear time (e.g., finding a mean of only two binary input strings) and report some empirical findings concerning combinatorial properties of optimal means.

cs.DM↗

arXiv2019

Mathematical Programming Models for Mean Computation in Dynamic Time Warping Spaces

The dynamic time warping (dtw) distance is an established tool for mining time series data. The DTW-Mean problem consists of computing a series which minimizes the so-called Fréchet function, that is, the sum of squared dtw-distances to a given sample of time series. DTW-Mean is NP-hard and intractable in practice. So far, this challenging problem has been solved by various heuristic approaches without any performance guarantees. We give a polynomial-time algorithm yielding lower bounds on the domain of a mean time series which translate into lower bounds on the Fréchet function. We then formulate the problem as a discrete nonlinear optimization problem based on network flows. We introduce several mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) formulations in order to solve DTW-Mean optimally. Our formulations are based on techniques such as outer approximations and nonlinear reformulations of the well-known big M indicator constraints. Finally, we conduct several computational experiments to compare the different formulations on several instances derived from the UCR Time Series Classification Archive. While in general DTW-Mean remains quite challenging, our fomrulations yield good results in several important specialized probem settings.

math.OC↗

arXiv2019

Co-Clustering Under the Maximum Norm

Co-clustering, that is, partitioning a numerical matrix into homogeneous submatrices, has many applications ranging from bioinformatics to election analysis. Many interesting variants of co-clustering are NP-hard. We focus on the basic variant of co-clustering where the homogeneity of a submatrix is defined in terms of minimizing the maximum distance between two entries. In this context, we spot several NP-hard as well as a number of relevant polynomial-time solvable special cases, thus charting the border of tractability for this challenging data clustering problem. For instance, we provide polynomial-time solvability when having to partition the rows and columns into two subsets each (meaning that one obtains four submatrices). When partitioning rows and columns into three subsets each, however, we encounter NP-hardness even for input matrices containing only values from {0, 1, 2}.

cs.DM↗

arXiv2019

Good Things Come to Those Who Swap Objects on Paths

We study a simple exchange market, introduced by Gourvés, Lesca and Wilczynski (IJCAI-17), where every agent initially holds a single object. The agents have preferences over the objects, and two agents may swap their objects if they both prefer the object of the other agent. The agents live in an underlying social network that governs the structure of the swaps: Two agents can only swap their objects if they are adjacent. We investigate the REACHABLE OBJECT problem, which asks whether a given starting situation can ever lead, by means of a sequence of swaps, to a situation where a given agent obtains a given object. Our results answer several central open questions on the complexity of REACHABLE OBJECT. First, the problem is polynomial-time solvable if the social network is a path. Second, the problem is NP-hard on cliques and generalized caterpillars. Finally, we establish a three-versus-four dichotomy result for preference lists of bounded length: The problem is easy if all preference lists have length at most three, and the problem becomes NP-hard even if all agents have preference lists of length at most four.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2019

Tight Hardness Results for Consensus Problems on Circular Strings and Time Series

Consensus problems for strings and sequences appear in numerous application contexts, ranging from bioinformatics over data mining to machine learning. Closing some gaps in the literature, we show that several fundamental problems in this context are NP- and W[1]-hard, and that the known (partially brute-force) algorithms are close to optimality assuming the Exponential Time Hypothesis. Among our main contributions is to settle the complexity status of computing a mean in dynamic time warping spaces which, as pointed out by Brill et al. [DMKD 2019], suffered from many unproven or false assumptions in the literature. We prove this problem to be NP-hard and additionally show that a recent dynamic programming algorithm is essentially optimal. In this context, we study a broad family of circular string alignment problems. This family also serves as a key for our hardness reductions, and it is of independent (practical) interest in molecular biology. In particular, we show tight hardness and running time lower bounds for Circular Consensus String; notably, the corresponding non-circular version is easily linear-time solvable.

cs.DM↗

arXiv2018

Exact Mean Computation in Dynamic Time Warping Spaces

Dynamic time warping constitutes a major tool for analyzing time series. In particular, computing a mean series of a given sample of series in dynamic time warping spaces (by minimizing the Fréchet function) is a challenging computational problem, so far solved by several heuristic and inexact strategies. We spot some inaccuracies in the literature on exact mean computation in dynamic time warping spaces. Our contributions comprise an exact dynamic program computing a mean (useful for benchmarking and evaluating known heuristics). Based on this dynamic program, we empirically study properties like uniqueness and length of a mean. Moreover, experimental evaluations reveal substantial deficits of state-of-the-art heuristics in terms of their output quality. We also give an exact polynomial-time algorithm for the special case of binary time series.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2018

Computational Complexity Aspects of Point Visibility Graphs

A point visibility graph is a graph induced by a set of points in the plane where the vertices of the graph represent the points in the point set and two vertices are adjacent if and only if no other point from the point set lies on the line segment between the two corresponding points. The set of all point visibility graphs form a graph class which is examined from a computational complexity perspective in this paper. We show NP-hardness for several classic graph problems on point visibility graphs such as Feedback Vertex Set, Longest Induced Path, Bisection and $\mathcal{F}$-free Vertex Deletion (for certain sets $\mathcal{F}$). Furthermore, we consider the complexity of the Dominating Set problem on point visibility graphs of points on a grid.

cs.DM↗

arXiv2018

A Parameterized Algorithmics Framework for Degree Sequence Completion Problems in Directed Graphs

There has been intensive work on the parameterized complexity of the typically NP-hard task to edit undirected graphs into graphs fulfilling certain given vertex degree constraints. In this work, we lift the investigations to the case of directed graphs; herein, we focus on arc insertions. To this end, we develop a general two-stage framework which consists of efficiently solving a problem-specific number problem and transferring its solution to a solution for the graph problem by applying flow computations. In this way, we obtain fixed-parameter tractability and polynomial kernelizability results, with the central parameter being the maximum vertex in- or outdegree of the output digraph. Although there are certain similarities with the much better studied undirected case, the flow computation used in the directed case seems not to work for the undirected case while $f$-factor computations as used in the undirected case seem not to work for the directed case.

cs.DM↗

arXiv2017

Finding Points in General Position

We study computational aspects of the General Position Subset Selection problem defined as follows: Given a set of points in the plane, find a maximum-cardinality subset of points in general position. We prove that General Position Subset Selection is NP-hard, APX-hard, and give several fixed-parameter tractability results as well as a subexponential running time lower bound based on the Exponential Time Hypothesis.

cs.CG↗

arXiv2017

Multi-Player Diffusion Games on Graph Classes

We study competitive diffusion games on graphs introduced by Alon et al. [1] to model the spread of influence in social networks. Extending results of Roshanbin [8] for two players, we investigate the existence of pure Nash equilibria for at least three players on different classes of graphs including paths, cycles, grid graphs and hypercubes; as a main contribution, we answer an open question proving that there is no Nash equilibrium for three players on (m x n) grids with min(m, n) >= 5. Further, extending results of Etesami and Basar [3] for two players, we prove the existence of pure Nash equilibria for four players on every d-dimensional hypercube.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2016

Parameterizing edge modification problems above lower bounds

We study the parameterized complexity of a variant of the $F$-free Editing problem: Given a graph $G$ and a natural number $k$, is it possible to modify at most $k$ edges in $G$ so that the resulting graph contains no induced subgraph isomorphic to $F$? In our variant, the input additionally contains a vertex-disjoint packing $\mathcal{H}$ of induced subgraphs of $G$, which provides a lower bound $h(\mathcal{H})$ on the number of edge modifications required to transform $G$ into an $F$-free graph. While earlier works used the number $k$ as parameter or structural parameters of the input graph $G$, we consider instead the parameter $\ell:=k-h(\mathcal{H})$, that is, the number of edge modifications above the lower bound $h(\mathcal{H})$. We develop a framework of generic data reduction rules to show fixed-parameter tractability with respect to $\ell$ for $K_3$-Free Editing, Feedback Arc Set in Tournaments, and Cluster Editing when the packing $\mathcal{H}$ contains subgraphs with bounded solution size. For $K_3$-Free Editing, we also prove NP-hardness in case of edge-disjoint packings of $K_3$s and $\ell=0$, while for $K_q$-Free Editing and $q\ge 6$, NP-hardness for $\ell=0$ even holds for vertex-disjoint packings of $K_q$s. In addition, we provide NP-hardness results for $F$-free Vertex Deletion, were the aim is to delete a minimum number of vertices to make the input graph $F$-free.

cs.DM↗

arXiv2016

Partitioning Perfect Graphs into Stars

The partition of graphs into "nice" subgraphs is a central algorithmic problem with strong ties to matching theory. We study the partitioning of undirected graphs into same-size stars, a problem known to be NP-complete even for the case of stars on three vertices. We perform a thorough computational complexity study of the problem on subclasses of perfect graphs and identify several polynomial-time solvable cases, for example, on interval graphs and bipartite permutation graphs, and also NP-complete cases, for example, on grid graphs and chordal graphs.

cs.DM↗

arXiv2016

Win-Win Kernelization for Degree Sequence Completion Problems

We study provably effective and efficient data reduction for a class of NP-hard graph modification problems based on vertex degree properties. We show fixed-parameter tractability for NP-hard graph completion (that is, edge addition) cases while we show that there is no hope to achieve analogous results for the corresponding vertex or edge deletion versions. Our algorithms are based on transforming graph completion problems into efficiently solvable number problems and exploiting f-factor computations for translating the results back into the graph setting. Our core observation is that we encounter a win-win situation: either the number of edge additions is small or the problem is polynomial-time solvable. This approach helps in answering an open question by Mathieson and Szeider [JCSS 2012] concerning the polynomial kernelizability of Degree Constraint Edge Addition and leads to a general method of approaching polynomial-time preprocessing for a wider class of degree sequence completion problems.

cs.DM↗