On the minimum common integer partition problem

  • Authors:
  • Xin Chen;Lan Liu;Zheng Liu;Tao Jiang

  • Affiliations:
  • School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Nanyang Tech. Univ., Singapore;Department of Computer Science, Univ. of California at Riverside;Department of Computer Science, Univ. of California at Riverside;Department of Computer Science, Univ. of California at Riverside

  • Venue:
  • CIAC'06 Proceedings of the 6th Italian conference on Algorithms and Complexity
  • Year:
  • 2006

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

We introduce a new combinatorial optimization problem in this paper, called the Minimum Common Integer Partition (MCIP) problem, which was inspired by computational biology applications including ortholog assignment and DNA fingerprint assembly. A partition of a positive integer n is a multiset of positive integers that add up to exactly n, and an integer partition of a multiset S of integers is defined as the multiset union of partitions of integers in S. Given a sequence of multisets S1, ⋯, Sk of integers, where k ≥ 2, we say that a multiset is a common integer partition if it is an integer partition of every multiset Si, 1≤ i≤ k. The MCIP problem is thus defined as to find a common integer partition of S1, ⋯, Sk with the minimum cardinality. It is easy to see that the MCIP problem is NP-hard since it generalizes the well-known Set Partition problem. We can in fact show that it is APX-hard. We will also present a $\frac{5}{4}$-approximation algorithm for the MCIP problem when k = 2, and a $\frac{3k(k-1)}{3k-2}$-approximation algorithm for k ≥ 3.