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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)). 

We study the multi-level Steiner tree problem: a generalization of the Steiner tree problem in graphs where terminals T require varying priority, level, or quality of service. In this problem, we seek to find a minimum cost tree containing edges of varying rates such that any two terminals u, v with priorities P(u), P(v) are connected using edges of rate min{P(u),P(v)} or better. The case where edge costs are proportional to their rate is approximable to within a constant factor of the optimal solution. For the more general case of non-proportional costs, this problem is hard to approximate with ratio c log log n, where n is the number of vertices in the graph. A simple greedy algorithm by Charikar et al., however, provides a min{2(ln |T | + 1), lρ}-approximation in this setting, where ρ is an approximation ratio for a heuristic solver for the Steiner tree problem and l is the number of priorities or levels (Byrka et al. give a Steiner tree algorithm with ρ ≈ 1.39, for example). In this paper, we describe a natural generalization to the multi-level case of the classical (single-level) Steiner tree approximation algorithm based on Kruskal’s minimum spanning tree algorithm. We prove that this algorithm achieves an approximation ratio at least as good as Charikar et al., and experimentally performs better with respect to the optimum solution. We develop an integer linear programming formulation to compute an exact solution for the multi-level Steiner tree problem with non-proportional edge costs and use it to evaluate the performance of our algorithm on both random graphs and multi-level instances derived from SteinLib. 

Let f be a drawing in the Euclidean plane of a graph G, which is understood to be a 1-dimensional simplicial complex. We assume that every edge of G is drawn by f as a curve of constant algebraic complexity, and the ratio of the length of the longest simple path to the the length of the shortest edge is poly(n). In the drawing f, a path P of G, or its image in the drawing π = f(P), is β-stretch if π is a simple (non-self-intersecting) curve, and for every pair of distinct points p ∈ P and q ∈ P , the length of the sub-curve of π connecting f(p) with f(q) is at most β∥f(p) − f(q)∥, where ∥.∥ denotes the Euclidean distance. We introduce and study the β-stretch Path Problem (βSP for short), in which we are given a pair of vertices s and t of G, and we are to decide whether in the given drawing of G there exists a β-stretch path P connecting s and t. We also output P if it exists. The βSP quantifies a notion of “near straightness” for paths in a graph G, motivated by gerrymandering regions in a map, where edges of G represent natural geographical/political boundaries that may be chosen to bound election districts. The notion of a β-stretch path naturally extends to cycles, and the extension gives a measure of how gerrymandered a district is. Furthermore, we show that the extension is closely related to several studied measures of local fatness of geometric shapes. We prove that βSP is strongly NP-complete. We complement this result by giving a quasi-polynomial time algorithm, that for a given ε > 0, β ∈ O(poly(log |V (G)|)), and s, t ∈ V (G), outputs a β-stretch path between s and t, if a (1 − ε)β-stretch path between s and t exists in the drawing.