Algorithms for Vertex-Weighted Matching in Graphs

A matching M in a graph is a subset of edges such that no two edges in M are incident on the same vertex. Matching is a fundamental combinatorial problem that has applications in many contexts: high-performance computing, bioinformatics, network switch design, web technologies, etc. Examples in the first context include sparse linear systems of equations, where matchings are used to place large matrix elements on or close to the diagonal, to compute the block triangular decomposition of sparse matrices, to construct sparse bases for the null space or column space of under-determined matrices, and to coarsen graphs in multi-level graph partitioning algorithms. In the first part of this thesis, we develop exact and approximation algorithms for vertex weighted matchings, an under-studied variant of the weighted matching problem. We propose three exact algorithms, three half approximation algorithms, and a two-third approximation algorithm. We exploit inherent properties of this problem such as lexicographical orders, decomposition into sub-problems, and the reachability property, not only to design efficient algorithms, but also to provide simple proofs of correctness of the proposed algorithms. In the second part of this thesis, we describe work on a new parallel half-approximation algorithm for weighted matching. Algorithms for computing optimal matchings are not amenable to parallelism, and hence we consider approximation algorithms here. We extend the existing work on a parallel half approximation algorithm for weighted matching and provide an analysis of its time complexity. We support the theoretical observations with experimental results obtained with MatchBoxP, toolkit designed and implemented in C++ and MPI using modern software engineering techniques. The work in this thesis has resulted in better understanding of matching theory, a functional public-domain software toolkit, and modeling of the sparsest basis problem as a vertex-weighted matching problem.