I have two list of 2d vectors of size m and n and I need to find minimum distance between each node of first list with the nodes of 2d list. I wonder if it is possible to do it in better time than O(nm). Let's assume that we can change data structures as we please. What do you think?
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I have a set of N objects and N * N distances between them. I want to cluster this set on subsets, such that in each cluster there are all objects has the same distance and mean(cluster_size) on all clusters is maximized.
I tried to solve this task by such algorithm:
Lets enumerate all unique distances between objects.
For each unique distance X lets build graph based with objects as nodes and adjacency matrix, where edge between A and B is present if distance between objects A and B is exactly X
Lets find maximum clique in this graph. If size of this clique is bigger than current maximum - update maximum and store clique as Result
Delete objects stored in Result from set of objects
Repeat until set of objects is not empty
Is there are any more efficient [approximate] solution?
Mean(cluster size) = total number of points / number of clusters
The only way to maximize this is to minimize the number of clusters. That seems a fairly bad choice as optimization target. You may want to reconsider this objective.
Apart from that I think your algorithm is fairly sensible. As the problem likely is NP hard, you do want to use a greedy approximation.
I suggest to be more lazy in recomputing, and add some bounds.
Build subgraphs for every unique distance.
Sort subgraphs by size, descending.
Unless you have a cached value from a previous iteration, find the largest clique in each subgraph. Remember the overall largest clique. Stop if the current largest is larger than the remaining subgraphs.
Output best subgraph found.
Remove the contained nodes from all graphs, and forget those best cliques that contain any of the nodes just found. Go back to 2.
I have a set of N points (in particular this point are binary string) and for each of them I have a discrete metric (the Hamming distance) such that given two points, i and j, Dij is the distance between the i-th and the j-th point.
I want to find a subset of k elements (with k < N of course) such that the distance between this k points is the maximum as possibile.
In other words what I want is to find a sort of "border points" that cover the maximum area in the space of the points.
If k = 2 the answer is trivial because I can try to search the two most distant element in the matrix of distances and these are the two points, but how I can generalize this question when k>2?
Any suggest? It's a NP-hard problem?
Thanks for the answer
One generalisation would be "find k points such that the minimum distance between any two of these k points is as large as possible".
Unfortunately, I think this is hard, because I think if you could do this efficiently you could find cliques efficiently. Suppose somebody gives you a matrix of distances and asks you to find a k-clique. Create another matrix with entries 1 where the original matrix had infinity, and entries 1000000 where the original matrix had any finite distance. Now a set of k points in the new matrix where the minimum distance between any two points in that set is 1000000 corresponds to a set of k points in the original matrix which were all connected to each other - a clique.
This construction does not take account of the fact that the points correspond to bit-vectors and the distance between them is the Hamming distance, but I think it can be extended to cope with this. To show that a program capable of solving the original problem can be used to find cliques I need to show that, given an adjacency matrix, I can construct a bit-vector for each point so that pairs of points connected in the graph, and so with 1 in the adjacency matrix, are at distance roughly A from each other, and pairs of points not connected in the graph are at distance B from each other, where A > B. Note that A could be quite close to B. In fact, the triangle inequality will force this to be the case. Once I have shown this, k points all at distance A from each other (and so with minimum distance A, and a sum of distances of k(k-1)A/2) will correspond to a clique, so a program finding such points will find cliques.
To do this I will use bit-vectors of length kn(n-1)/2, where k will grow with n, so the length of the bit-vectors could be as much as O(n^3). I can get away with this because this is still only polynomial in n. I will divide each bit-vector into n(n-1)/2 fields each of length k, where each field is responsible for representing the connection or lack of connection between two points. I claim that there is a set of bit-vectors of length k so that all of the distances between these k-long bit-vectors are roughly the same, except that two of them are closer together than the others. I also claim that there is a set of bit-vectors of length k so that all of the distances between them are roughly the same, except that two of them are further apart than the others. By choosing between these two different sets, and by allocating the nearer or further pair to the two points owning the current bit-field of the n(n-1)/2 fields within the bit-vector I can create a set of bit-vectors with the required pattern of distances.
I think these exist because I think there is a construction that creates such patterns with high probability. Create n random bit-vectors of length k. Any two such bit-vectors have an expected Hamming distance of k/2 with a variance of k/4 so a standard deviation of sqrt(k)/2. For large k we expect the different distances to be reasonably similar. To create within this set two points that are very close together, make one a copy of the other. To create two points that are very far apart, make one the not of the other (0s in one where the other has 1s and vice versa).
Given any two points their expected distance from each other will be (n(n-1)/2 - 1)k/2 + k (if they are supposed to be far apart) and (n(n-1)/2 -1)k/2 (if they are supposed to be close together) and I claim without proof that by making k large enough the expected difference will triumph over the random variability and I will get distances that are pretty much A and pretty much B as I require.
#mcdowella, I think that probably I don't explain very well my problem.
In my problem I have binary string and for each of them I can compute the distance to the other using the Hamming distance
In this way I have a distance matrix D that has a finite value in each element D(i,j).
I can see this distance matrix like a graph: infact, each row is a vertex in the graph and in the column I have the weight of the arc that connect the vertex Vi to the vertex Vj.
This graph, for the reason that I explain, is complete and it's a clique of itself.
For this reason, if i pick at random k vertex from the original graph I obtain a subgraph that is also complete.
From all the possible subgraph with order k I want to choose the best one.
What is the best one? Is a graph such that the distance between the vertex as much large but also much uniform as possible.
Suppose that I have two vertex v1 and v2 in my subgraph and that their distance is 25, and I have three other vertex v3, v4, v5, such that
d(v1, v3) = 24, d(v1, v4) = 7, d(v2, v3) = 5, d(v2, v4) = 22, d(v1, v5) = 14, d(v1, v5) = 14
With these distance I have that v3 is too far from v1 but is very near to v2, and the opposite situation for v4 that is too far from v2 but is near to v1.
Instead I prefer to add the vertex v5 to my subgraph because it is distant to the other two in a more uniform way.
I hope that now my problem is clear.
You think that your formulation is already correct?
I have claimed that the problem of finding k points such that the minimum distance between these points, or the sum of the distances between these points, is as large as possible is NP-complete, so there is no polynomial time exact answer. This suggests that we should look for some sort of heuristic solution, so here is one, based on an idea for clustering. I will describe it for maximising the total distance. I think it can be made to work for maximising the minimum distance as well, and perhaps for other goals.
Pick k arbitrary points and note down, for each point, the sum of the distances to the other points. For each other point in the data, look at the sum of the distances to the k chosen points and see if replacing any of the chosen points with that point would increase the sum. If so, replace whichever point increases the sum most and continue. Keep trying until none of the points can be used to increase the sum. This is only a local optimum, so repeat with another set of k arbitrary/random points in the hope of finding a better one until you get fed up.
This inherits from its clustering forebear the following property, which might at least be useful for testing: if the points can be divided into k classes such that the distance between any two points in the same class is always less than the distance between any two points in different classes then, when you have found k points where no local improvement is possible, these k points should all be from different classes (because if not, swapping out one of a pair of points from the same class would increase the sum of distances between them).
This problem is known as the MaxMin Diversity Problem (MMDP). It is known to be NP-hard. However, there are algorithms for giving good approximate solutions in reasonable time, such as this one.
I'm answering this question years after it was asked because I was looking for algorithms to solve the same problem, and had trouble even finding out what to call it.
Problem :
Form a network, that is, all the bases should be reachable from every base.
One base is reachable from other base if there is a path of tunnels connecting bases.
Bases are suppose based on a 2-D plane having integer coordinates.
Cost of building tunnels between two bases are coordinates (x1,y1) and (x2,y2) is min{ |x1-x2|, |y1-y2| }.
What is the minimum cost such that a network is formed.
1 ≤ N ≤ 100000 // Number of bases
-10^9 ≤ xi,yi ≤ 10^9
Typical Kruskal's minimum spanning tree implementation.But u cannot store (10^5)^2 edges.
So how i should make my cost matrix , how to make a graph so i can apply Kruskal algorithm?
You should not store the whole graph as you don't actually need it. In fact in this case I think Prim's algorithm is more suitable in this case. You will not need all the edges at any single time, instead on each iteration you will update a min dist array of size N. Of course complexity will still be in the order of N**2 but at least memory will not be an issue. Also you can further use the specific way distance is computed to improve the complexity(using some ordered structure to store the points).
I believe the only edges that will ever be used (due to your cost function) will be from each base to at most 4 neighbours. The neighbours to use are the closest point with greater (or equal) x value, the closest point with smaller (or equal) x value, the closest point with greater (or equal) y value, the closest point with smaller (or equal) y value.
You can compute these neighbours efficiently by sorting the points according to each axis and then linking each point with the point ahead and behind it in sorted order.
It does not matter if there is more than one point at a particular value of coordinate.
There will therefore be only O(4n) edges for you to consider with Kruskal's algorithm.
Given a DCEL, how do I find the closest pair of sites?
Say the given DCEL is for a Voronoi diagram, how do I find the closest pair of sites? And what is the time complexity?
The simplest way to do it is to iterate over all edges, find their adjoining faces, compute the distance between the Voronoi centers, and return the smallest pair. If your DCEL implementation is such that you cannot iterate directly over edges, you can use any graph-traversal algorithm (depth-first, breadth-first, etc.) to do the iteration.
In any case, the time complexity is proportional to the size of your input datastructure.
Assume we have an array that holds n vectors. We want to calculate the maximum euclidean distance between those vectors.
The easiest (naive?) approach would be to iterate the array and for each vector calculate its distance with the all subsequent vectors and then find the maximum.
This algorithm, however, would grow (n-1)! with respect to the size of the array.
Is there any other more efficient approach to this problem?
Thanks.
Your computation of the naive algorithm's complexity is wonky, it should be O(n(n-1)/2), which reduces to O(n^2). Computing the distance between two vectors is O(k) where k is the number of elements in the vector; this still gives a complexity well below O(n!).
Complexity is O(N^2 * K) for brute force algorithm (K is number of elem in vector). But we can do better by knowing that in euclidean space for points A,B and C:
|AB| + |AC| >= |BC|
Algorithm should be something like this:
If max distance found so far is MAX and for a |AB| there is a point C, such that distance |AC| and |CB| already computed and MAX > |AC|+|CB|, then we can skip calculation for |AB|.
It is difficult to tell complexity of this algorithm, but my gut feeling tells me it is not far from O(N*log(N)*K)
This question has been here before, see How to find two most distant points?
And the answer is: is can be done in less than O(n^2) in Euclidean space. See also http://mukeshiiitm.wordpress.com/2008/05/27/find-the-farthest-pair-of-points/
So suppose you have a pair of points A and B. Consider the hypersphere that have A and B at the north and south pole respectively. Could any point C contained in the hypersphere be farther from A than B?
Further suppose we partition the pointset into sqrt(N) hyperboxes with sqrt(N) points each. For any pair of hyperboxes, we can calculate in k time the maximum distance possible between any two points of the infinite set of points contained within them - by simply calculating the distance between their furthest corners. If we already have a candidate better than this we can discard all pairs of points from those hyperboxes.