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Combinatorial Optimization and Applications pp 601–616Cite as

The Influence of Preprocessing on Steiner Tree Approximations

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 9486))

Abstract

Given an edge-weighted graph G and a node subset R, the Steiner tree problem asks for an R-spanning tree of minimum weight. There are several strong approximation algorithms for this NP-hard problem, but research on their practicality is still in its early stages.

In this study, we investigate how the behavior of approximation algorithms changes when applying preprocessing routines first. In particular, the shrunken instances allow us to consider algorithm parameterizations that have been impractical before, shedding new light on the algorithms’ respective drawbacks and benefits.

Funded by project CH 897/1-1 of the German Research Foundation (DFG).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Article [2] is an extended version of both [1, 4], with several implementation improvements; when referring to these studies in the following, we will only cite [2].

  2. 2.

    In [5], an implementation of [3] is considered; in [2], the improved variant [9] is investigated instead, as it gives the same guarantee with a smaller runtime complexity.

  3. 3.

    This word order and abbreviation is historically common, to avoid conflicts with the established abbreviation ‘MST’ for minimum spanning tree.

  4. 4.

    Those results were obtained on different machines, with different preprocessing and memory limits. The machines are compared via the DIMACS benchmark [6]; higher is faster. We: \(\underline{375}\), 16 GB limit. PUW [17]: \(\underline{389}\), no (relevant) limit. [19]: \(\underline{307}\), no limit. All success rates are reported with respect to a 1-hour time limit.

References

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Acknowledgements

We thank Mihai Popa for implementations of reduction tests, and Google for funding him through the Google Summer of Code 2014 program. We also thank the authors of [8] for making their exact solver available, and Renato Werneck for detailed logs of their experiments in [17].

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Computer Science, University of Osnabrück, Osnabrück, Germany

    Stephan Beyer & Markus Chimani

Authors
  1. Stephan Beyer
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  2. Markus Chimani
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Stephan Beyer .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Mathematics and Computer Science, Marywood University, Scranton, Pennsylvania, USA

    Zaixin Lu

  2. North Carolina Central University, Durham, North Carolina, USA

    Donghyun Kim

  3. University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Texas, USA

    Weili Wu

  4. Texas Southern University, Houston, Texas, USA

    Wei Li

  5. University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Texas, USA

    Ding-Zhu Du

Appendices

A Distribution of Solution Values

For each of the three specific instances below, we generated 2000 shufflings. The plots below show the distribution of the corresponding TM solution values.

figure a

B More Detailed Table for Influence of Preprocessing

The table below shows detailed information (number of instances, average \(\chi \) in %, and statistical data on the gaps) averaged over the instance groupings proposed in [2]. Statistical data is: the mean \(\mu \) of the gaps (averaged and how often it was better, not changed, or worse); the deviation \(\sigma \), and the skewness (how often it was negative, zero, or positive). All data is given for original and preprocessed instances; for each instance we consider 50 different random shufflings.

Group

#

avg\(\chi \)

avg \(\mu \)

# \(\mu \)

avg \(\sigma \)

# orig skew

# prep skew

orig

prep

b

n

w

orig

prep

\(<0\)

\(=0\)

\(>0\)

\(<0\)

\(=0\)

\(>0\)

EuclidSparse

15

73.68

13.06

13.73

6

1

8

15.43

17.01

0

1

14

0

2

13

EuclidComplete

14

21.11

10.84

10.84

0

14

0

13.06

13.06

0

1

13

0

1

13

RandomSparse

96

30.41

25.52

22.26

64

12

20

21.58

19.00

1

11

84

1

24

71

RandomComplete

13

9.75

31.90

25.14

7

2

4

28.53

20.86

0

2

11

0

6

7

IncidenceSparse

280

84.44

133.47

127.36

154

50

76

53.82

50.68

2

2

276

3

2

275

IncidenceComplete

73

97.84

393.61

393.61

0

73

0

88.51

88.51

0

0

73

0

0

73

ConstructedSparse

9

85.57

143.19

141.86

5

1

3

50.48

51.54

0

1

8

0

1

8

SimpleRectilinear

218

46.45

16.35

12.53

158

17

43

16.86

13.90

1

22

195

0

37

181

HardRectilinear

54

64.27

23.04

19.40

52

0

2

20.88

19.30

0

0

54

0

0

54

VLSI / Grid

206

92.36

35.49

35.76

100

12

94

27.36

27.13

1

6

199

1

5

200

WireRouting

115

98.48

0.01

0.02

28

1

86

0.44

0.51

0

5

110

0

5

110

Coverage 10

531

86.77

73.09

71.42

223

84

224

33.69

32.75

3

16

512

4

20

507

Coverage 20

130

78.27

118.35

115.13

56

34

40

40.16

38.50

1

7

122

1

8

121

Coverage 30

127

78.92

184.86

179.50

62

41

24

55.90

52.67

0

4

123

0

7

120

Coverage 40

91

71.20

25.46

21.50

73

1

17

22.79

20.82

0

0

91

0

0

91

Coverage 50

119

45.51

16.15

12.46

90

5

24

17.17

14.32

0

1

118

0

9

110

Coverage 60

41

32.33

13.61

9.44

36

1

4

15.09

10.88

1

2

38

0

12

29

Coverage 70

18

14.77

8.01

3.60

12

4

2

9.62

6.04

0

8

10

0

8

10

Coverage 80

11

9.06

4.89

3.09

5

6

0

6.56

4.56

0

6

5

0

6

5

Coverage 90

14

5.87

3.47

1.95

11

2

1

7.32

5.02

0

2

12

0

4

10

Coverage 100

11

0.75

1.11

0.22

6

5

0

3.31

0.89

0

5

6

0

9

2

All

1093

73.15

75.69

72.86

574

183

336

32.32

30.53

5

51

1037

5

83

1005

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Beyer, S., Chimani, M. (2015). The Influence of Preprocessing on Steiner Tree Approximations. In: Lu, Z., Kim, D., Wu, W., Li, W., Du, DZ. (eds) Combinatorial Optimization and Applications. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9486. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26626-8_44

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26626-8_44

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