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1. Why Is Maximum Clique Often Easy in Practice?

   https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2019.1970  

   Walteros, Jose L.; Buchanan, Austin (November 2020, Operations Research)

   null (Ed.)

   To this day, the maximum clique problem remains a computationally challenging problem. Indeed, despite researchers’ best efforts, there exist unsolved benchmark instances with 1,000 vertices. However, relatively simple algorithms solve real-life instances with millions of vertices in a few seconds. Why is this the case? Why is the problem apparently so easy in many naturally occurring networks? In this paper, we provide an explanation. First, we observe that the graph’s clique number ω is very near to the graph’s degeneracy d in most real-life instances. This observation motivates a main contribution of this paper, which is an algorithm for the maximum clique problem that runs in time polynomial in the size of the graph, but exponential in the gap [Formula: see text] between the clique number ω and its degeneracy-based upper bound d+1. When this gap [Formula: see text] can be treated as a constant, as is often the case for real-life graphs, the proposed algorithm runs in time [Formula: see text]. This provides a rigorous explanation for the apparent easiness of these instances despite the intractability of the problem in the worst case. Further, our implementation of the proposed algorithm is actually practical—competitive with the best approaches from the literature. 

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2. Breaking the r _max Barrier: Enhanced Approximation Algorithms for Partial Set Multicover Problem

   https://doi.org/10.1287/ijoc.2020.0975  

   Ran, Yingli; Zhang, Zhao; Tang, Shaojie; Du, Ding-Zhu (October 2020, INFORMS Journal on Computing)

   null (Ed.)

   Given an element set E of order n, a collection of subsets [Formula: see text], a cost c S on each set [Formula: see text], a covering requirement r e for each element [Formula: see text], and an integer k, the goal of a minimum partial set multicover problem (MinPSMC) is to find a subcollection [Formula: see text] to fully cover at least k elements such that the cost of [Formula: see text] is as small as possible and element e is fully covered by [Formula: see text] if it belongs to at least r e sets of [Formula: see text]. This problem generalizes the minimum k-union problem (MinkU) and is believed not to admit a subpolynomial approximation ratio. In this paper, we present a [Formula: see text]-approximation algorithm for MinPSMC, in which [Formula: see text] is the maximum size of a set in S. And when [Formula: see text], we present a bicriteria algorithm fully covering at least [Formula: see text] elements with approximation ratio [Formula: see text], where [Formula: see text] is a fixed number. These results are obtained by studying the minimum density subcollection problem with (or without) cardinality constraint, which might be of interest by itself. 

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3. Counting and Enumerating Optimum Cut Sets for Hypergraph k -Partitioning Problems for Fixed k

   https://doi.org/10.1287/moor.2022.0259  

   Beideman, Calvin; Chandrasekaran, Karthekeyan; Wang, Weihang (December 2023, Mathematics of Operations Research)

   We consider the problem of enumerating optimal solutions for two hypergraph k-partitioning problems, namely, Hypergraph-k-Cut and Minmax-Hypergraph-k-Partition. The input in hypergraph k-partitioning problems is a hypergraph [Formula: see text] with positive hyperedge costs along with a fixed positive integer k. The goal is to find a partition of V into k nonempty parts [Formula: see text]—known as a k-partition—so as to minimize an objective of interest. (1) If the objective of interest is the maximum cut value of the parts, then the problem is known as Minmax-Hypergraph-k-Partition. A subset of hyperedges is a minmax-k-cut-set if it is the subset of hyperedges crossing an optimum k-partition for Minmax-Hypergraph-k-Partition. (2) If the objective of interest is the total cost of hyperedges crossing the k-partition, then the problem is known as Hypergraph-k-Cut. A subset of hyperedges is a min-k-cut-set if it is the subset of hyperedges crossing an optimum k-partition for Hypergraph-k-Cut. We give the first polynomial bound on the number of minmax-k-cut-sets and a polynomial-time algorithm to enumerate all of them in hypergraphs for every fixed k. Our technique is strong enough to also enable an [Formula: see text]-time deterministic algorithm to enumerate all min-k-cut-sets in hypergraphs, thus improving on the previously known [Formula: see text]-time deterministic algorithm, in which n is the number of vertices and p is the size of the hypergraph. The correctness analysis of our enumeration approach relies on a structural result that is a strong and unifying generalization of known structural results for Hypergraph-k-Cut and Minmax-Hypergraph-k-Partition. We believe that our structural result is likely to be of independent interest in the theory of hypergraphs (and graphs). Funding: All authors were supported by NSF AF 1814613 and 1907937. 

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4. Improving Envy Freeness up to Any Good Guarantees Through Rainbow Cycle Number

   https://doi.org/10.1287/moor.2021.0252  

   Chaudhury, Bhaskar Ray; Garg, Jugal; Mehlhorn, Kurt; Mehta, Ruta; Misra, Pranabendu (November 2024, Mathematics of Operations Research)

   We study the problem of fairly allocating a set of indivisible goods among n agents with additive valuations. Envy freeness up to any good (EFX) is arguably the most compelling fairness notion in this context. However, the existence of an EFX allocation has not been settled and is one of the most important problems in fair division. Toward resolving this question, many impressive results show the existence of its relaxations. In particular, it is known that 0.618-EFX allocations exist and that EFX allocation exists if we do not allocate at most (n-1) goods. Reducing the number of unallocated goods has emerged as a systematic way to tackle the main question. For example, follow-up works on three- and four-agents cases, respectively, allocated two more unallocated goods through an involved procedure. In this paper, we study the general case and achieve sublinear numbers of unallocated goods. Through a new approach, we show that for every [Formula: see text], there always exists a [Formula: see text]-EFX allocation with sublinear number of unallocated goods and high Nash welfare. For this, we reduce the EFX problem to a novel problem in extremal graph theory. We define the notion of rainbow cycle number [Formula: see text] in directed graphs. For all [Formula: see text] is the largest k such that there exists a k-partite graph [Formula: see text], in which each part has at most d vertices (i.e., [Formula: see text] for all [Formula: see text]); for any two parts V_iand V_j, each vertex in V_ihas an incoming edge from some vertex in V_jand vice versa; and there exists no cycle in G that contains at most one vertex from each part. We show that any upper bound on [Formula: see text] directly translates to a sublinear bound on the number of unallocated goods. We establish a polynomial upper bound on [Formula: see text], yielding our main result. Furthermore, our approach is constructive, which also gives a polynomial-time algorithm for finding such an allocation. Funding: J. Garg was supported by the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering [Grant CCF-1942321]. R. Mehta was supported by the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering [Grant CCF-1750436]. 

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5. Marchenko–Pastur law with relaxed independence conditions

   https://doi.org/10.1142/s2010326321500404  

   Bryson, Jennifer; Vershynin, Roman; Zhao, Hongkai (January 2021, Random Matrices: Theory and Applications)

   null (Ed.)

   We prove the Marchenko–Pastur law for the eigenvalues of [Formula: see text] sample covariance matrices in two new situations where the data does not have independent coordinates. In the first scenario — the block-independent model — the [Formula: see text] coordinates of the data are partitioned into blocks in such a way that the entries in different blocks are independent, but the entries from the same block may be dependent. In the second scenario — the random tensor model — the data is the homogeneous random tensor of order [Formula: see text], i.e. the coordinates of the data are all [Formula: see text] different products of [Formula: see text] variables chosen from a set of [Formula: see text] independent random variables. We show that Marchenko–Pastur law holds for the block-independent model as long as the size of the largest block is [Formula: see text], and for the random tensor model as long as [Formula: see text]. Our main technical tools are new concentration inequalities for quadratic forms in random variables with block-independent coordinates, and for random tensors. 

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