A note on rounding fractional matchings with constant-factor strong negative correlation

Abstract

We describe new dependent-rounding algorithms for bipartite graphs. Given a fractional matching $x$ of graph $G = (U \cup V, E)$, the algorithms return an integral solution $X$ such that each right-node $v \in V$ has at most one edge, and where the variables $X_e$ also satisfy broad non-positive correlation properties. In particular, for any edges $e_1, e_2$ sharing a left-node $u \in U$, the variables $X_{e_1}, X_{e_2}$ have \emph{strong} negative-correlation, i.e. the expectation of $X_{e_1} X_{e_2}$ is significantly below $x_{e_1} x_{e_2}$. Dependent rounding schemes with these properties have been used for a approximation algorithms for job-scheduling on unrelated machines to minimize weighted completion times, among other applications. Our new algorithm achieves simpler and qualitatively stronger bounds compared to prior algorithms. In particular, we achieve a negative-correlation property $$ \E[X_{e_1} X_{e_2}] \leq 0.79751 \ x_{e_1} x_{e_2}, $$ which is a significant constant-factor improvement over Baveja, Qu & Srinivasan (2023).