A spanner of a graph G is a subgraph H that approximately preserves shortest path distances in G. Spanners are commonly applied to compress computation on metric spaces corresponding to weighted input graphs. Classic spanner constructions can seamlessly handle edge weights, so long as error is measured multiplicatively. In this work, we investigate whether one can similarly extend constructions of spanners with purely additive error to weighted graphs. These extensions are not immediate, due to a key lemma about the size of shortest path neighborhoods that fails for weighted graphs. Despite this, we recover a suitable amortized version, which lets us prove direct extensions of classic +2 and +4 unweighted spanners (both all-pairs and pairwise) to +2W and +4W weighted spanners, where W is the maximum edge weight. Specifically, we show that a weighted graph G contains all-pairs (pairwise) +2W and +4W weighted spanners of size O(n3/2) and O(n7/5) (O(np1/3) and O(np2/7)) respectively. For a technical reason, the +6 unweighted spanner becomes a +8W weighted spanner; closing this error gap is an interesting remaining open problem. That is, we show that G contains all-pairs (pairwise) +8W weighted spanners of size O(n4/3) (O(np1/4)).
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Better Distance Preservers and Additive Spanners
We study two popular ways to sketch the shortest path distances of an input graph. The first is distance preservers , which are sparse subgraphs that agree with the distances of the original graph on a given set of demand pairs. Prior work on distance preservers has exploited only a simple structural property of shortest paths, called consistency , stating that one can break shortest path ties such that no two paths intersect, split apart, and then intersect again later. We prove that consistency alone is not enough to understand distance preservers, by showing both a lower bound on the power of consistency and a new general upper bound that polynomially surpasses it. Specifically, our new upper bound is that any p demand pairs in an n -node undirected unweighted graph have a distance preserver on O( n 2/3 p 2/3 + np 1/3 edges. We leave a conjecture that the right bound is O ( n 2/3 p 2/3 + n ) or better. The second part of this paper leverages these distance preservers in a new construction of additive spanners , which are subgraphs that preserve all pairwise distances up to an additive error function. We give improved error bounds for spanners with relatively few edges; for example, we prove that all graphs have spanners on O(n) edges with + O ( n 3/7 + ε ) error. Our construction can be viewed as an extension of the popular path-buying framework to clusters of larger radii.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2129139
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10322414
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM Transactions on Algorithms
- Volume:
- 17
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 1549-6325
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Given a metric space ℳ = (X,δ), a weighted graph G over X is a metric t-spanner of ℳ if for every u,v ∈ X, δ(u,v) ≤ δ_G(u,v) ≤ t⋅ δ(u,v), where δ_G is the shortest path metric in G. In this paper, we construct spanners for finite sets in metric spaces in the online setting. Here, we are given a sequence of points (s₁, …, s_n), where the points are presented one at a time (i.e., after i steps, we have seen S_i = {s₁, … , s_i}). The algorithm is allowed to add edges to the spanner when a new point arrives, however, it is not allowed to remove any edge from the spanner. The goal is to maintain a t-spanner G_i for S_i for all i, while minimizing the number of edges, and their total weight. Under the L₂-norm in ℝ^d for arbitrary constant d ∈ ℕ, we present an online (1+ε)-spanner algorithm with competitive ratio O_d(ε^{-d} log n), improving the previous bound of O_d(ε^{-(d+1)}log n). Moreover, the spanner maintained by the algorithm has O_d(ε^{1-d}log ε^{-1})⋅ n edges, almost matching the (offline) optimal bound of O_d(ε^{1-d})⋅ n. In the plane, a tighter analysis of the same algorithm provides an almost quadratic improvement of the competitive ratio to O(ε^{-3/2}logε^{-1}log n), by comparing the online spanner with an instance-optimal spanner directly, bypassing the comparison to an MST (i.e., lightness). As a counterpart, we design a sequence of points that yields a Ω_d(ε^{-d}) lower bound for the competitive ratio for online (1+ε)-spanner algorithms in ℝ^d under the L₁-norm. Then we turn our attention to online spanners in general metrics. Note that, it is not possible to obtain a spanner with stretch less than 3 with a subquadratic number of edges, even in the offline setting, for general metrics. We analyze an online version of the celebrated greedy spanner algorithm, dubbed ordered greedy. With stretch factor t = (2k-1)(1+ε) for k ≥ 2 and ε ∈ (0,1), we show that it maintains a spanner with O(ε^{-1}logε^{-1})⋅ n^{1+1/k} edges and O(ε^{-1}n^{1/k}log² n) lightness for a sequence of n points in a metric space. We show that these bounds cannot be significantly improved, by introducing an instance that achieves an Ω(1/k⋅ n^{1/k}) competitive ratio on both sparsity and lightness. Furthermore, we establish the trade-off among stretch, number of edges and lightness for points in ultrametrics, showing that one can maintain a (2+ε)-spanner for ultrametrics with O(ε^{-1}logε^{-1})⋅ n edges and O(ε^{-2}) lightness.more » « less
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A spanner of a graph is a subgraph that preserves lengths of shortest paths up to a multiplicative distortion. For every k, a spanner with size O(n^{1+1/k}) and stretch (2k+1) can be constructed by a simple centralized greedy algorithm, and this is tight assuming Erdős girth conjecture. In this paper we study the problem of constructing spanners in a local manner, specifically in the Local Computation Model proposed by Rubinfeld et al. (ICS 2011). We provide a randomized Local Computation Agorithm (LCA) for constructing (2r-1)-spanners with Õ(n^{1+1/r}) edges and probe complexity of Õ(n^{1-1/r}) for r ∈ {2,3}, where n denotes the number of vertices in the input graph. Up to polylogarithmic factors, in both cases, the stretch factor is optimal (for the respective number of edges). In addition, our probe complexity for r = 2, i.e., for constructing a 3-spanner, is optimal up to polylogarithmic factors. Our result improves over the probe complexity of Parter et al. (ITCS 2019) that is Õ(n^{1-1/2r}) for r ∈ {2,3}. Both our algorithms and the algorithms of Parter et al. use a combination of neighbor-probes and pair-probes in the above-mentioned LCAs. For general k ≥ 1, we provide an LCA for constructing O(k²)-spanners with Õ(n^{1+1/k}) edges using O(n^{2/3}Δ²) neighbor-probes, improving over the Õ(n^{2/3}Δ⁴) algorithm of Parter et al. By developing a new randomized LCA for graph decomposition, we further improve the probe complexity of the latter task to be O(n^{2/3-(1.5-α)/k}Δ²), for any constant α > 0. This latter LCA may be of independent interest.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3490147
