Cutting corners cheaply, or how to remove Steiner points

TL;DR

This paper proves that the Steiner Point Removal problem can be solved with polylogarithmic distortion, providing a new randomized polynomial-time algorithm and a novel metric decomposition technique.

Contribution

It introduces a new variant of metric decomposition with tail bounds and resolves the longstanding open question on Steiner Point Removal distortion.

Findings

Existence of a minor graph with polylogarithmic distortion for all terminal pairs.

A randomized polynomial-time algorithm for Steiner Point Removal.

Development of a new metric decomposition with tail bounds.

Abstract

Our main result is that the Steiner Point Removal (SPR) problem can always be solved with polylogarithmic distortion, which answers in the affirmative a question posed by Chan, Xia, Konjevod, and Richa (2006). Specifically, we prove that for every edge-weighted graph $G = (V,E,w)$ and a subset of terminals $T \subseteq V$, there is a graph $G'=(T,E',w')$ that is isomorphic to a minor of $G$, such that for every two terminals $u,v\in T$, the shortest-path distances between them in $G$ and in $G'$ satisfy $d_{G,w}(u,v) \le d_{G',w'}(u,v) \le O(\log^5|T|) \cdot d_{G,w}(u,v)$. Our existence proof actually gives a randomized polynomial-time algorithm. Our proof features a new variant of metric decomposition. It is well-known that every $n$-point metric space $(X,d)$ admits a $\beta$-separating decomposition for $\beta=O(\log n)$, which roughly means for every desired diameter bound $\Delta>0$ there is a randomized partitioning of $X$, which satisfies the following separation requirement: for every $x,y \in X$, the probability they lie in different clusters of the partition is at most $\beta\,d(x,y)/\Delta$. We introduce an additional requirement, which is the following tail bound: for every shortest-path $P$ of length $d(P) \leq \Delta/\beta$, the number of clusters of the partition that meet the path $P$, denoted $Z_P$, satisfies $\Pr[Z_P > t] \le 2e^{-\Omega(t)}$ for all $t>0$.