Eunjin Oh (오은진), Approximation Algorithms for the Geometric Multimatching Problem

Let S and T be two sets of points in a metric space with a total of n points. Each point in S and T has an associated value that specifies an upper limit on how many points it can be matched with from the other set. A multimatching between S and T is a way of pairing points such that each point in S is matched with at least as many points in T as its assigned value, and vice versa for each point in T. The cost of a multimatching is defined as the sum of the distances between all matched pairs of points. The geometric multimatching problem seeks to find a multimatching that minimizes this cost. A special case where each point is matched to at most one other point is known as the geometric many-to-many matching problem.

We present two results for these problems when the underlying metric space has a bounded doubling dimension. Specifically, we provide the first near-linear-time approximation scheme for the geometric multimatching problem in terms of the output size. Additionally, we improve upon the best-known approximation algorithm for the geometric many-to-many matching problem, previously introduced by Bandyapadhyay and Xue (SoCG 2024), which won the best paper award at SoCG 2024.

This is joint work with Shinwoo An and Jie Xue.