## Recent news on the minimum fill-in problem

We have just seen a a paper in the Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA), 2017. The proceedings is available online for the curious. A paper from the proceedings is the subject of this post.

Minimum fill-in: Inapproximability and almost tight lower bounds,
by, Yixin Cao and R. B. Sandeep (url).

The minimum fill-in problem is one of the core problems in sparse direct methods. This problem is NP-complete [6]. The NP-completeness of the problem was first conjectured to be true in 1976 by Rose, Tarjan, and Lueker [5] in terms of the elimination process on undirected graphs. Then Rose and Tarjan [4] proved in 1978 that finding an elimination ordering on a directed graph that gives minimum fill-in is NP-complete (there was apparently a glitch in the proof which was rectified by Gilbert [1] two years later). Finally, Yannakakis [6] proved the NP-completeness of the minimum fill-in problem on undirected graphs in 1981.

The sparse matrix community needs a heuristic to tackle the minimum fill-in problem, as direct methods are used in many applications. There are quite efficient and effective heuristics for this purpose, which are variants of the approximate minimum degree and incomplete nested dissection algorithms. These heuristics are efficiently implemented in programs that are wide spread. The mentioned heuristics do not have any performance guarantees (except for classes of graphs such as graphs with good separators) but they are very-well established. So there is an NP-complete problem, practitioners have some heuristics and are happy with what they have.

On the other hand, the minimum fill-in problem poses many challenges to the theoreticians. Natanzon, Shamir, and Sharan [2] obtained an algorithm that approximates the minimum fill-in ($k$) by bounding the fill by $8k^2$ in $O(k n^3)$ time, for a graph with $n$ vertices. The paper by Cao and Sandeep shows that unless P=NP, there is no polynomial time approximation scheme (PTAS) for the minimum fill-in problem. A PTAS is an algorithm which takes an instance of an optimization problem and a parameter $\epsilon > 0$ and, in polynomial time, produces a solution that is within a factor $1 + \epsilon$ of the optimum. This is a bad news in a way: no simple heuristic with a performance guarantee for theoretically oriented practitioners is in view.

The paper by Cao and Sandeep contains two other theorems, ruling out algorithms with approximation $1+\epsilon$ and with a running time $2^{O(n^{1-\delta})}$, and exact algorithms with running time in $2^{O(k^{1/2-\delta})}\cdot n^{O(1)}$, assuming exponential time hypothesis (ETH). Here $n$ is again the number of vertices, $k$ is an integer parameterizing the fill-in, and $\delta$ is a small positive constant. ETH posits that the satisfiability problem with at most three variables per clause cannot be solved in $2^{o(p+q)}$ time, where $p$ and $q$ denote the number of clauses and variables, respectively, in the problem.

If you are interested in these problems, then see the tree-width and minimum fill-in challenges. The minimum tree-width is related to the shortest elimination tree over all elimination orderings of an undirected graph, which one of us had proved to be NP-complete [3].

### References

1. John R. Gilbert, A note on the NP-completeness of vertex elimination on directed graphs, SIAM Journal on Algebraic and Discrete Methods, 1 (1980), pp. 292–294 (link).
2. Assaf Natanzon, Ron Shamir, and Roded Sharan, A polynomial approximation for the minimum fill-in problem, SIAM Journal on Computing, 30, (2000), pp. 1067–1079 (link).
3. Alex Pothen, The complexity of optimal elimination trees,
Tech. Report, Department of Computer Science, Penn State University, 1988 (link).
4. Donald J. Rose and Robert E. Tarjan, Algorithmic aspects of vertex elimination in directed graphs, SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics, 34 (1978), pp. 176–197 (link).
5. Donald J. Rose, Robert E. Tarjan, and George S. Lueker, Algorithmic aspects of vertex elimination on graphs, SIAM Journal on Computing, 5 (1976), pp. 266–283 (link).
6. Mihalis Yannakakis, Computing the minimum fill-in is NP-complete, SIAM Journal on Algebraic and Discrete Methods, 2 (1981), pp. 77–79 (link).