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The maximum bipartite matching problem is among the most fundamental and well-studied problems in combinatorial optimization. A beautiful and celebrated combinatorial algorithm of Hopcroft and Karp [26] shows that maximum bipartite matching can be solved in O(m√n) time on a graph with n vertices and m edges. For the case of very dense graphs, a different approach based on fast matrix multiplication was subsequently developed [27, 39], that achieves a running time of O(n2.371). For the next several decades, these results represented the fastest known algorithms for the problem until in 2013, a ground-breaking work of Madry [36] gave a significantly faster algorithm for sparse graphs. Subsequently, a sequence of works developed increasingly faster algorithms for solving maximum bipartite matching, and more generally directed maximum flow, culminating in a spectacular recent breakthrough [9] that gives an m1+o(1) time algorithm for maximum bipartite matching (and more generally, for min cost flows). These more recent developments collectively represented a departure from earlier combinatorial approaches: they all utilized continuous techniques based on interior-point methods for solving linear programs. This raises a natural question: are continuous techniques essential to obtaining fast algorithms for the bipartite matching problem? Our work makes progress on this question by presenting a new, purely combinatorial algorithm for bipartite matching, that, on moderately dense graphs outperforms both Hopcroft- Karp and the fast matrix multiplication based algorithms. Similar to the classical algorithms for bipartite matching, our approach is based on iteratively augmenting a current matching using augmenting paths in the (directed) residual flow network. A common method for designing fast algorithms for directed flow problems is via the multiplicative weights update (MWU) framework, that effectively reduces the flow problem to decremental single-source shortest paths (SSSP) in directed graphs. Our main observation is that a slight modification of this reduction results in a special case of SSSP that appears significantly easier than general decremental directed SSSP. Our main technical contribution is an efficient algorithm for this special case of SSSP, that outperforms the current state of the art algorithms for general decremental SSSP with adaptive adversary, leading to a deterministic algorithm for bipartite matching, whose running time is Õ(m1/3n5/3). This new algorithm thus starts to outperform the Hopcroft-Karp algorithm in graphs with m = ω(n7/4), and it also outperforms the fast matrix multiplication based algorithms on dense graphs. We believe that this framework for obtaining faster combinatorial algorithms for bipartite matching by exploiting the special properties of the resulting decremental SSSP instances is one of the main conceptual contributions of our work that we hope paves the way for even faster combinatorial algorithms for bipartite matching. Finally, using a standard reduction from the maximum vertex-capacitated s-t flow problem in directed graphs to maximum bipartite matching, we also obtain an O(m1/3n5/3) time deterministic algorithm for maximum vertex-capacitated s-t flow when all vertex capacities are identical.
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fastball: a fast algorithm to randomly sample bipartite graphs with fixed degree sequences
Abstract Many applications require randomly sampling bipartite graphs with fixed degrees or randomly sampling incidence matrices with fixed row and column sums. Although several sampling algorithms exist, the ‘curveball’ algorithm is the most efficient with an asymptotic time complexity of $O(n~log~n)$ and has been proven to sample uniformly at random. In this article, we introduce the ‘fastball’ algorithm, which adopts a similar approach but has an asymptotic time complexity of $O(n)$. We show that a C$$\texttt{++}$$ implementation of fastball randomly samples large bipartite graphs with fixed degrees faster than curveball, and illustrate the value of this faster algorithm in the context of the fixed degree sequence model for backbone extraction.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2211744
- PAR ID:
- 10384730
- Publisher / Repository:
- Oxford University Press
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Complex Networks
- Volume:
- 10
- Issue:
- 6
- ISSN:
- 2051-1329
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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