Randomized Contractions for Multiobjective Minimum Cuts

We show that Karger’s randomized contraction method [7] can be adapted to multiobjective global minimum cut problems with a constant number of edge or node budget constraints to give efficient algorithms. For global minimum cuts with a single edge-budget constraint, our extension of the randomized contraction method has running time Õ(n3) in an n-node graph improving upon the best-known randomized algorithm with running time Õ(n4) due to Armon and Zwick [1]. Our analysis also gives a new upper bound of O(n3) for the number of optimal solutions for a single edge-budget min cut problem. For the case of (k − 1) edge-budget constraints, the extension of our algorithm saves a logarithmic factor from the best-known randomized running time of O(n2k log3 n). A main feature of our algorithms is to adaptively choose, at each step, the appropriate cost function used in the random selection of edges to be contracted. For the global min cut problem with a constant number of node budgets, we give a randomized algorithm with running time Õ(n2), improving the current best determinisitic running time of O(n3) due to Goemans and Soto [5]. Our method also shows that the total number of distinct optimal solutions is bounded by ( n 2 ) as in the case of global min-cuts. Our algorithm extends to the node-budget constrained global min cut problem excluding a given sink with the same running time and bound on number of optimal solutions, again improving upon the best-known running time by a factor of O(n). For node-budget constrained problems, our improvements arise from incorporating the idea of merging any infeasible super-nodes that arise during the random contraction process. In contrast to cuts excluding a sink, we note that the node-cardinality constrained min-cut problem containing a given source is strongly NP-hard using a reduction from graph bisection. 1998 ACM Subject Classification G.2.2 Graph Theory