Article ID: | iaor2001485 |
Country: | United States |
Volume: | 29 |
Issue: | 2 |
Start Page Number: | 648 |
End Page Number: | 670 |
Publication Date: | Oct 1999 |
Journal: | SIAM Journal On Computing |
Authors: | Srinivasan Aravind |
Keywords: | bin packing, set covering |
Several important NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems can be posed as packing/covering integer programs; the randomized rounding technique of Raghavan and Thompson is a powerful tool with which to approximate them well. We present one elementary unifying property of all these integer linear programs and use the FKG correlation inequality to derive an improved analysis of randomized rounding on them. This yields a pessimistic estimator, thus presenting deterministic polynomial-time algorithms for them with approximation guarantees that are significantly better than those known.