Simple deterministic approximation algorithms for counting matchings

  • Authors:
  • Mohsen Bayati;David Gamarnik;Dimitriy Katz;Chandra Nair;Prasad Tetali

  • Affiliations:
  • Stanford University, Stanford, CA;MIT, Cambridge, MA;MIT, Cambridge, MA;Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA;Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the thirty-ninth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

We construct a deterministic fully polynomial time approximationscheme (FPTAS) for computing the total number of matchings in abounded degree graph. Additionally, for an arbitrary graph, weconstruct a deterministic algorithm for computing approximately thenumber of matchings within running time exp(O(√n log2n)),where n is the number of vertices. Our approach is based on the correlation decay technique originating in statistical physics. Previously thisapproach was successfully used for approximately counting thenumber of independent sets and colorings in some classes of graphs [1, 24, 6].Thus we add another problem to the small, but growing, class of P-complete problems for whichthere is now a deterministic FPTAS.