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1. New Applications of Nearest-Neighbor Chains: Euclidean TSP and Motorcycle Graphs

   https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ISAAC.2019.51  

   Mamano, N.; Efrat, A.; Eppstein, D.; Frishberg, D.; Goodrich, M.; Kobourov, S.; Matias, P.; Polishchuk, V. (January 2019, 30th International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation (ISAAC 2019))

   We show new applications of the nearest-neighbor chain algorithm, a technique that originated in agglomerative hierarchical clustering. We use it to construct the greedy multi-fragment tour for Euclidean TSP in O(n log n) time in any fixed dimension and for Steiner TSP in planar graphs in O(n sqrt(n)log n) time; we compute motorcycle graphs, a central step in straight skeleton algorithms, in O(n^(4/3+epsilon)) time for any epsilon>0. 

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2. A Simple Algorithm for kNN Sampling in General Metrics

   Gardner, Kirk P.; Sheehy, Donald R. (January 2020, Proceedings of the 32nd Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry)

   Keil, Mark; Mondal, Debajyoti (Ed.)

   Finding the kth nearest neighbor to a query point is a ubiquitous operation in many types of metric computations, especially those in unsupervised machine learning. In many such cases, the distance to k sample points is used as an estimate of the local density of the sample. In this paper, we give an algorithm that takes a finite metric (P,d) and an integer k and produces a subset S ⊆ P with the property that for any q ∈ P, the distance to the second nearest point of S to q is a constant factor approximation to the distance to the kth nearest point of P to q. Thus, the sample S may be used in lieu of P. In addition to being much smaller than P, the distance queries on S only require finding the second nearest neighbor instead of the kth nearest neighbor. This is a significant improvement, especially because theoretical guarantees on kth nearest neighbor methods often require k to grow as a function of the input size n. 

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3. Approximate Nearest Neighbors in Limited Space

   https://doi.org/10.1137/1.9781611975031  

   Indyk, Piotr; Wagner, Tal (January 2018, Conference on Learning Theory)

   We consider the (1+ϵ)-approximate nearest neighbor search problem: given a set X of n points in a d-dimensional space, build a data structure that, given any query point y, finds a point x∈X whose distance to y is at most (1+ϵ)minx∈X ‖x−y‖ for an accuracy parameter ϵ∈(0,1). Our main result is a data structure that occupies only O(ϵ^−2 n log(n)log(1/ϵ)) bits of space, assuming all point coordinates are integers in the range {−n^O(1)…n^O(1)}, i.e., the coordinates have O(logn) bits of precision. This improves over the best previously known space bound of O(ϵ^−2 n log(n)^2), obtained via the randomized dimensionality reduction method of Johnson and Lindenstrauss (1984). We also consider the more general problem of estimating all distances from a collection of query points to all data points X, and provide almost tight upper and lower bounds for the space complexity of this problem. 

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4. Combinatorial Algorithms for Optimal Design

   Madan, V.; Singh, M.; Tantipongpipat, U.; Xie, W. (June 2019, Annual Conference on Learning Theory)

   In an optimal design problem, we are given a set of linear experiments v1,…,vn∈Rd and k≥d, and our goal is to select a set or a multiset S⊆[n] of size k such that Φ((∑i∈Sviv⊤i)−1) is minimized. When Φ(M)=Determinant(M)1/d, the problem is known as the D-optimal design problem, and when Φ(M)=Trace(M), it is known as the A-optimal design problem. One of the most common heuristics used in practice to solve these problems is the local search heuristic, also known as the Fedorov’s exchange method (Fedorov, 1972). This is due to its simplicity and its empirical performance (Cook and Nachtrheim, 1980; Miller and Nguyen, 1994; Atkinson et al., 2007). However, despite its wide usage no theoretical bound has been proven for this algorithm. In this paper, we bridge this gap and prove approximation guarantees for the local search algorithms for D-optimal design and A-optimal design problems. We show that the local search algorithms are asymptotically optimal when kd is large. In addition to this, we also prove similar approximation guarantees for the greedy algorithms for D-optimal design and A-optimal design problems when k/d is large. 

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5. Combinatorial Algorithms for Optimal Design

   Madan, M; Singh, M.; Tantipongpipat, U; Xie, W. (June 2019, Conference on Learning Theory, COLT 2019)

   In an optimal design problem, we are given a set of linear experiments v1,…,vn∈Rd and k≥d, and our goal is to select a set or a multiset S⊆[n] of size k such that Φ((∑i∈Sviv⊤i)−1) is minimized. When Φ(M)=Determinant(M)1/d, the problem is known as the D-optimal design problem, and when Φ(M)=Trace(M), it is known as the A-optimal design problem. One of the most common heuristics used in practice to solve these problems is the local search heuristic, also known as the Fedorov’s exchange method (Fedorov, 1972). This is due to its simplicity and its empirical performance (Cook and Nachtrheim, 1980; Miller and Nguyen, 1994; Atkinson et al., 2007). However, despite its wide usage no theoretical bound has been proven for this algorithm. In this paper, we bridge this gap and prove approximation guarantees for the local search algorithms for D-optimal design and A-optimal design problems. We show that the local search algorithms are asymptotically optimal when kd is large. In addition to this, we also prove similar approximation guarantees for the greedy algorithms for D-optimal design and A-optimal design problems when kd is large. 

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