Improved Approximation Guarantees for Packing and Covering Integer Programs
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1995-10-01T00:00:00Z
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Abstract
Several important NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems can be posed as packing/covering integer programs; the randomized rounding technique of Raghavan and Thompson is a powerful tool to approximate them well. We present one elementary unifying property of all these integer programs, and use the FKG correlation inequality to derive an improved analysis of randomized rounding on them. This also yields a pessimistic estimator, thus presenting deterministic polynomial-time algorithms for them with approximation guarantees significantly better than those known.
Part of this work was done while at the School of Mathematics, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA, supported by grant 93-6-6 of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to the Institute for Advanced Study. Part of this work was done while at DIMACS, supported by NSF grant NSF-STC91-19999 to DIMACS and by support to DIMACS from the New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology. Part was done while visiting the Department of Computer Science, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK, supported in part by the ESPRIT Basic Research Action Programme of the EC under contract No. 7141 (project ALCOM II).