Approximating the $k$-Set Packing Problem by Local Improvements

Abstract

We study algorithms based on local improvements for the $k$-Set Packing problem. The well-known local improvement algorithm by Hurkens and Schrijver [14] has been improved by Sviridenko and Ward [15] from $\frac{k}{2}+\epsilon$ to $\frac{k+2}{3}$, and by Cygan [7] to $\frac{k+1}{3}+\epsilon$ for any $\epsilon >0$. In this paper, we achieve the approximation ratio $\frac{k+1}{3}+\epsilon$ for the $k$-Set Packing problem using a simple polynomial-time algorithm based on the method by Sviridenko and Ward [15]. With the same approximation guarantee, our algorithm runs in time singly exponential in $\frac{1}{\epsilon ^2}$, while the running time of Cygan’s algorithm [7] is doubly exponential in $\frac{1}{\epsilon }$. On the other hand, we construct an instance with locality gap $\frac{k+1}{3}$ for any algorithm using local improvements of size $O(n^{1/5})$, where $n$ is the total number of sets. Thus, our approximation guarantee is optimal with respect to results achievable by algorithms based on local improvements.

Research supported in part by NSF Grant CCF-0964655 and CCF-1320814.