Seminar • Algorithms and Complexity — Dynamic Low-Stretch Trees via Dynamic Low-Diameter Decompositions

Wednesday, March 6, 2019 1:30 pm - 1:30 pm EST (GMT -05:00)

Gramoz Goranci, University of Vienna

Spanning trees of low average stretch on the non-tree edges are natural graph-theoretic objects that have found applications in fast solvers for symmetric diagonally dominant (SDD) linear systems, construction of competitive oblivious routing schemes and approximation algorithms.

In this talk, I will present the first non-trivial algorithm for maintaining such trees under edge insertions and deletions to the input graph. Our algorithm has update time n^{1/2+o(1)} and the average stretch of the maintained tree is n^{o(1)}, which matches the stretch in the seminal result of Alon et al. [SICOMP' 95]. The key ingredients to our result are (1) dynamic maintenance of low-diameter decompositions (LLDs), (2) controlling the propagation of updates within a hierarchy of dynamic LDDs, and (3) incorporation of dynamic cut sparsifiers to improve the update time.

This is joint work with Sebastian Forster, and will appear at STOC 2019.