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One of the most important and well-studied settings for network design is edge-connectivity requirements. This encompasses uniform demands such as the Minimum k-Edge-Connected Spanning Subgraph problem (k-ECSS), as well as nonuniform demands such as the Survivable Network Design problem. A weakness of these formulations, though, is that we are not able to ask for fault-tolerance larger than the connectivity. Taking inspiration from recent definitions and progress in graph spanners, we introduce and study new variants of these problems under a notion of relative fault-tolerance. Informally, we require not that two nodes are connected if there are a bounded number of faults (as in the classical setting), but that two nodes are connected if there are a bounded number of faults and the two nodes are connected in the underlying graph post-faults. That is, the subgraph we build must "behave" identically to the underlying graph with respect to connectivity after bounded faults. We define and introduce these problems, and provide the first approximation algorithms: a (1+4/k)-approximation for the unweighted relative version of k-ECSS, a 2-approximation for the weighted relative version of k-ECSS, and a 27/4-approximation for the special case of Relative Survivable Network Design with only a single demand with a connectivity requirement of 3. To obtain these results, we introduce a number of technical ideas that may of independent interest. First, we give a generalization of Jain’s iterative rounding analysis that works even when the cut-requirement function is not weakly supermodular, but instead satisfies a weaker definition we introduce and term local weak supermodularity. Second, we prove a structure theorem and design an approximation algorithm utilizing a new decomposition based on important separators, which are structures commonly used in fixed-parameter algorithms that have not commonly been used in approximation algorithms.
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Controlling Epidemic Spread using Probabilistic Diffusion Models on Networks
The spread of an epidemic is often modeled by an SIR random process on a social network graph. The MinInfEdge problem for optimal social distancing involves minimizing the expected number of infections, when we are allowed to break at most B edges; similarly the MinInfNode problem involves removing at most B vertices. These are fundamental problems in epidemiology and network science. While a number of heuristics have been considered, the complexity of these problems remains generally open. In this paper, we present two bicriteria approximation algorithms for MinInfEdge, which give the first non-trivial approximations for this problem. The first is based on the cut sparsification result of Karger, and works when the transmission probabilities are not too small. The second is a Sample Average Approximation--based algorithm, which we analyze for the Chung-Lu random graph model. We also extend some of our results to tackle the MinInfNode problem.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1918749
- PAR ID:
- 10403942
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proc. International Conference on Artifical Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 11641-11654
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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