Jeffery Westbrook

A functional approach to external graph algorithms

AbstractWe present a new approach for designing external graph algorithms and use it to design simple, deterministic and randomized external algorithms for computing connected components, minimum spanning forests, bottleneck minimum spanning forests, maximal independent sets (randomized only), and maximal matchings in undirected graphs. Our I/ O bounds compete with those of previous approaches. We also introduce a semi-external model, in which the vertex set but not the edge set of a graph fits in main memory. In this model we give an improved connected components algorithm, using new results for external grouping and sorting with duplicates. Unlike previous approaches, ours is purely functional—without side effects—and is thus amenable to standard checkpointing and programming language optimization techniques. This is an important practical consideration for applications that may take hours to run.

Maintenance of a minimum spanning forest in a dynamic plane graph

Abstract : We give efficient algorithms for maintaining a minimum spanning forest of a planar graph subject to on-line modifications. The modifications supported include changes in the edge weights, and insertion and deletion of edges and vertices. To implement the algorithms, we develop a data structure called an edge-ordered dynamic tree, which is a variant of the dynamic tree data structure of Sleator and Tarjan. Using this data structure, our algorithms run in O(log n) time per operation and O(n) space. The algorithms can be used to maintain the connected components of a dynamic planar graph in O(log n) time per operation.

Maintaining Bridge-Connected and Biconnected Components On-Line

We consider the twin problems of maintaining the bridge-connected components and the biconnected components of a dynamic undirected graph. The allowed changes to the graph are vertex and edge insertions. We give an algorithm for each problem. With simple data structures, each algorithm runs inO(n logn +m) time, wheren is the number of vertices andm is the number of operations. We develop a modified version of the dynamic trees of Sleator and Tarjan that is suitable for efficient recursive algorithms, and use it to reduce the running time of the algorithms for both problems toO(mα(m,n)), where α is a functional inverse of Ackermanns function. This time bound is optimal. All of the algorithms useO(n) space.

Short encodings of planar graphs and maps

Abstract We discuss space-efficient encoding schemes for planar graphs and maps. Our results improve on the constants of previous schemes and can be achieved with simple encoding algorithms. They are near-optimal in number of bits per edge.

Randomized competitive algorithms for the list update problem

We prove upper and lower bounds on the competitiveness of randomized algorithms for the list update problem of Sleator and Tarjan. We give a simple and elegant randomized algorithm that is more competitive than the best previous randomized algorithm due to Irani. Our algorithm uses randomness only during an initialization phase, and from then on runs completely deterministically. It is the first randomized competitive algorithm with this property to beat the deterministic lower bound. We generalize our approach to a model in which access costs are fixed but update costs are scaled by an arbitrary constantd. We prove lower bounds for deterministic list update algorithms and for randomized algorithms against oblivious and adaptive on-line adversaries. In particular, we show that for this problem adaptive on-line and adaptive off-line adversaries are equally powerful.

A new, simpler linear-time dominators algorithm

We present a new linear-time algorithm to find the immediate dominators of all vertices in a flowgraph. Our algorithm is simpler than previous linear-time algorithms: rather than employ complicated data structures, we combine the use of microtrees and memoization with new observations on a restricted class of path compressions. We have implemented our algorithm, and we report experimental results that show that the constant factors are low. Compared to the standard, slightly superlinear algorithm of Lengauer and Tarjan, which has much less overhead, our algorithm runs 10-20% slower on real flowgraphs of reasonable size and only a few percent slower on very large flowgraphs.

Self-Organizing Data Structures

We survey results on self-organizing data structures for the search problem and concentrate on two very popular structures: the un-sorted linear list, and the binary search tree. For the problem of maintaining unsorted lists, also known as the list update problem, we present results on the competitiveness achieved by deterministic and random-ized on-line algorithms. For binary search trees, we present results for both on-line and oo-line algorithms. Self-organizing data structures can be used to build very eeective data compression schemes. We summarize theoretical and experimental results.

Online load balancing and network flow

In this paper we study two problems that can be viewed as on-line games on a dynamic bipartite graph. The first problem is on-line load balancing with preemption. A centralized scheduler must assign tasks to servers, processing on-line a sequence of task arrivals and departures. Each task is restricted to run on some subset of the servers. The scheduler attempts to keep the load well-balanced. If preemptive reassignments are disallowed, Azar et al. [3] proved a lower bound of Ω(n 1/2 ) on the ratio between the maximum load achieved by an on-line algorithm and the optimum off-line maximum load. We show that this ratio can be greatly reduced by an efficient scheduler using only a small amount of rescheduling.

Linear-Time Algorithms for Dominators and Other Path-Evaluation Problems

We present linear-time algorithms for the classic problem of finding dominators in a flowgraph, and for several other problems whose solutions require evaluating a function defined on paths in a tree. Although all these problems had linear-time solutions previously, our algorithms are simpler, in some cases substantially. Our improvements come from three new ideas: a refined analysis of path compression that gives a linear bound if the compressions favor certain nodes; replacement of random-access table look-up by a radix sort; and a more careful partitioning of a tree into easily managed parts. In addition to finding dominators, our algorithms find nearest common ancestors off-line, verify and construct minimum spanning trees, do interval analysis of a flowgraph, and build the component tree of a weighted tree. Our algorithms do not require the power of a random-access machine; they run in linear time on a pointer machine. The genesis of our work was the discovery of a subtle error in the analysis of a previous allegedly linear-time algorithm for finding dominators. That algorithm was an attempt to simplify a more complicated algorithm, which itself was intended to correct errors in a yet earlier algorithm. Our work provides a systematic study of the subtleties in the dominators problem, the techniques needed to solve it in linear time, and the range of application of the resulting methods. We have tried to make our techniques as simple and as general as possible and to understand exactly how earlier approaches to the dominators problem were either incorrect or overly complicated.

Fast Incremental Planarity Testing

The incremental planarity testing problem is to perform the following operations on a biconnected planar graph G of at most n vertices: test if an edge can be added between two vertices while preserving planarity; add edges and vertices that preserve planarity. Let m be the total number of operations. We present fast data structures for this problem that can be used in conjunction with the previous algorithm of Di Battista and Tamassia to achieve an O(α(m, n)) worst-case amortized time per test operation. If the graph is biconnected, a sequence of n additions can be performed in total time O(mα(m, n)) worst-case plus O(n) expected time. Our tree data structure is flexible and can answer in O(1) time queries about parents, roots, and nearest common ancestors while performing tree modifications such as inserting nodes, cutting edges, and merging or splitting nodes. If the graph is not biconnected then insertions of edges and vertices require O(log n) amortized expected time per operation.