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The main focus of this article is radius-based (supplier) clustering in the two-stage stochastic setting with recourse, where the inherent stochasticity of the model comes in the form of a budget constraint. In addition to the standard (homogeneous) setting where all clients must be within a distance\(R\)of the nearest facility, we provide results for the more general problem where the radius demands may beinhomogeneous(i.e., different for each client). We also explore a number of variants where additional constraints are imposed on the first-stage decisions, specifically matroid and multi-knapsack constraints, and provide results for these settings. We derive results for the most general distributional setting, where there is only black-box access to the underlying distribution. To accomplish this, we first develop algorithms for thepolynomial scenariossetting; we then employ a novelscenario-discardingvariant of the standardSample Average Approximationmethod, which crucially exploits properties of the restricted-case algorithms. We note that the scenario-discarding modification to the SAA method is necessary to optimize over the radius. 

In the k -cut problem, we want to find the lowest-weight set of edges whose deletion breaks a given (multi)graph into k connected components. Algorithms of Karger and Stein can solve this in roughly O ( n 2k ) time. However, lower bounds from conjectures about the k -clique problem imply that Ω ( n (1- o (1)) k ) time is likely needed. Recent results of Gupta, Lee, and Li have given new algorithms for general k -cut in n 1.98k + O(1) time, as well as specialized algorithms with better performance for certain classes of graphs (e.g., for small integer edge weights). In this work, we resolve the problem for general graphs. We show that the Contraction Algorithm of Karger outputs any fixed k -cut of weight α λ k with probability Ω k ( n - α k ), where λ k denotes the minimum k -cut weight. This also gives an extremal bound of O k ( n k ) on the number of minimum k -cuts and an algorithm to compute λ k with roughly n k polylog( n ) runtime. Both are tight up to lower-order factors, with the algorithmic lower bound assuming hardness of max-weight k -clique. The first main ingredient in our result is an extremal bound on the number of cuts of weight less than 2 λ k / k , using the Sunflower lemma. The second ingredient is a fine-grained analysis of how the graph shrinks—and how the average degree evolves—in the Karger process. 

The Lovász Local Lemma (LLL) is a cornerstone principle in the probabilistic method of combinatorics, and a seminal algorithm of Moser & Tardos (2010) provides an efficient randomized algorithm to implement it. This algorithm can be parallelized to give an algorithm that uses polynomially many processors and runs in O(log3 n) time, stemming from O(log n) adaptive computations of a maximal independent set (MIS). Chung et al. (2014) developed faster local and parallel algorithms, potentially running in time O (log^2 n), but these algorithms work under significantly more stringent conditions than the LLL. We give a new parallel algorithm that works under essentially the same conditions as the original algorithm of Moser & Tardos but uses only a single MIS computation, thus running in O(log^2 n) time. This conceptually new algorithm also gives a clean combinatorial description of a satisfying assignment which might be of independent interest. Our techniques extend to the deterministic LLL algorithm given by Chandrasekaran et al. (2013) leading to an NC-algorithm running in time O(log^2 n) as well. We also provide improved bounds on the runtimes of the sequential and parallel resampling-based algorithms originally developed by Moser & Tardos. Our bounds extend to any problem instance in which the tighter Shearer LLL criterion is satisfied. We also improve on the analysis of Kolipaka & Szegedy (2011) to give tighter concentration results.