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Probabilistic Analysis of a Greedy Heuristic for Euclidean Matching

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 July 2009

David Avis
Affiliation:
School of Computer Science McGill University, Montré, Québec H3A 2K6, Canada
Burgess Davis
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics and Statistics Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907
J. Michael Steele
Affiliation:
Program in Statistics and Opertions Research Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544

Abstract

Given a collection of n points in the plane, the Euclidean matching problem is the task of decomposing the collection into matched pairs connected by line segments in such a way as to minimize the sum of all the segment lengths. The greedy heuristic provides an approximate solution to the Euclidean matching problem by successively matching the two closest unmatched points. We study the behavior of Gn, the sum of the lengths of the segments produced by the greedy heuristic.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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