We present an algorithm that, with high probability, generates a random spanning tree from an edge-weighted undirected graph in \Otil(n^{5/3 }m^{1/3}) time\footnote{The \Otil(\cdot) notation hides \poly(\log n) factors}. The tree is sampled from a distribution where the probability of each tree is proportional to the product of its edge weights. This improves upon the previous best algorithm due to Colbourn et al. that runs in matrix multiplication time, O(n^\omega). For the special case of unweighted graphs, this improves upon the best previously known running time of \tilde{O}(\min\{n^{\omega},m\sqrt{n},m^{4/3}\}) for m >> n^{7/4} (Colbourn et al. '96, Kelner-Madry '09, Madry et al. '15).
The effective resistance metric is essential to our algorithm, as in the work of Madry et al., but we eschew determinant-based and random walk-based techniques used by previous algorithms. Instead, our algorithm is based on Gaussian elimination, and the fact that effective resistance is preserved in the graph resulting from eliminating a subset of vertices (called a Schur complement). As part of our algorithm, we show how to compute \eps-approximate effective resistances for a set SS of vertex pairs via approximate Schur complements in \Otil(m+(n + |S|)\eps^{-2}) time, without using the Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma which requires \Otil( \min\{(m + |S|)\eps^{-2}, m+n\eps^{-4} +|S|\eps^{-2}\}) time. We combine this approximation procedure with an error correction procedure for handing edges where our estimate isn't sufficiently accurate.
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Determinant-Preserving Sparsification of SDDM Matrices with Applications to Counting and Sampling Spanning Trees
We show variants of spectral sparsification routines can preserve the total
spanning tree counts of graphs, which by Kirchhoff's matrix-tree theorem, is
equivalent to determinant of a graph Laplacian minor, or equivalently, of any SDDM matrix. Our analyses utilizes this combinatorial connection to bridge between statistical leverage scores / effective resistances and the analysis of random graphs by [Janson, Combinatorics, Probability and Computing `94]. This leads to a routine that in quadratic time, sparsifies a graph down to about $n^{1.5}$ edges in ways that preserve both the determinant and the distribution of spanning trees (provided the sparsified graph is viewed as a random object). Extending this algorithm to work with Schur complements and approximate Choleksy factorizations leads to algorithms for counting and sampling spanning trees which are nearly optimal for dense graphs.
We give an algorithm that computes a $(1 \pm \delta)$ approximation to the determinant of any SDDM matrix with constant probability in about $n^2 \delta^{-2}$ time. This is the first routine for graphs that outperforms general-purpose routines for computing determinants of arbitrary matrices. We also give an algorithm that generates in about $n^2 \delta^{-2}$ time a spanning tree of a weighted undirected graph from a distribution with total variation
distance of $\delta$ from the $w$-uniform distribution .
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- Award ID(s):
- 1718533
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10061894
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 58th IEEE Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, FOCS 2017, Berkeley, CA, USA, October 15-17, 2017
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 926 to 937
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/FOCS.2017.90
