𝔖 Bobbio Scriptorium
✦   LIBER   ✦

New bounds on the barycenter heuristic for bipartite graph drawing

✍ Scribed by Xiao Yu Li; Matthias F. Stallmann


Publisher
Elsevier Science
Year
2002
Tongue
English
Weight
105 KB
Volume
82
Category
Article
ISSN
0020-0190

No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.

✦ Synopsis


The barycenter heuristic is often used to solve the NP-hard two-layer edge crossing minimization problem. It is well known that the barycenter heuristic can give solutions as bad as ( √ n ) times the optimum, where n is the number of nodes in the graph. However, the example used in the proof has many isolated nodes. Mäkinen [EATCS Bull. 70 (2000) 156-158] conjectured that a better performance ratio is possible if isolated nodes are not present. We show that the performance ratio for the barycenter heuristic is still ( √ n ) even for connected bipartite graphs. We also prove a tight constant ratio for the barycenter heuristic on bounded-degree graphs. The performance ratio is d -1, where d is the maximum degree of a node in the layer that can be permuted.