K Centers Problem | Set 1 (Greedy Approximate Algorithm)

Given n cities and distances between every pair of cities, select k cities to place warehouses (or ATMs or Cloud Server) such that the maximum distance of a city to a warehouse (or ATM or Cloud Server) is minimized.

For example consider the following four cities, 0, 1, 2 and 3 and distances between them, how do place 2 ATMs among these 4 cities so that the maximum distance of a city to an ATM is minimized.

There is no polynomial time solution available for this problem as the problem is a known NP-Hard problem. T**here is a polynomial time Greedy approximate algorithm, the greedy algorithm provides a solution which is never worse that twice the optimal solution.** The greedy solution works only if the distances between cities follow Triangular Inequality (Distance between two points is always smaller than sum of distances through a third point).

The 2-Approximate Greedy Algorithm:
1) Choose the first center arbitrarily.

2) Choose remaining k-1 centers using the following criteria.
Let c1, c2, c3, … ci be the already chosen centers. Choose
(i+1)’th center by picking the city which is farthest from already selected centers, i.e, the point p which has following value as maximum
Min[dist(p, c1), dist(p, c2), dist(p, c3), …. dist(p, ci)]

The following diagram taken from here illustrates above algorithm.

Proof that the above greedy algorithm is 2 approximate.
Let OPT be the maximum distance of a city from a center in the Optimal solution. We need to show that the maximum distance obtained from Greedy algorithm is 2*OPT.

The proof can be done using contradiction.

a) Assume that the distance from the furthest point to all centers is > 2·OPT.

b) This means that distances between all centers are also > 2·OPT.

c) We have k + 1 points with distances > 2·OPT between every pair.

d) Each point has a center of the optimal solution with distance <= OPT to it.

e) There exists a pair of points with the same center X in the optimal solution (pigeonhole principle: k optimal centers, k+1 points)

f) The distance between them is at most 2·OPT (triangle inequality) which is a contradiction.

Source:
http://algo2.iti.kit.edu/vanstee/courses/kcenter.pdf

This article is contributed by Harshit. Please write comments if you find anything incorrect, or you want to share more information about the topic discussed above