Improved approximations of packing and covering problems

Aravind Srinivasant Several important NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems can be posed as packing\couerirag integer pragramq the rarzrfomized rouradingtechnique of Raghavan & Thompson is a powerful tool to approximate them well. We present one elementary unifying property of all these integer programs (IPs), and use the FKG correlation inequality to derive an improved analysis of randomized rounding on them. Thk also yields a pessimistic estimator, thus presenting deter-ministic polynomial-time algorithms for them with approximation guarantees significantly better than those known.

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