Streaming Euclidean Max-Cut: Dimension vs Data Reduction

Abstract: Max-Cut is a fundamental problem that has been studied extensively in various settings. We design an algorithm for Euclidean Max-Cut, where the input is a set of points in $\mathbb{R}^d$, in the model of dynamic geometric streams, where the input $X\subseteq [\Delta]^d$ is presented as a sequence of point insertions and deletions. Previously, Frahling and Sohler [STOC 2005] designed a $(1+\epsilon)$-approximation algorithm for the low-dimensional regime, i.e., it uses space $\exp(d)$. To tackle this problem in the high-dimensional regime, which is of growing interest, one must improve the dependence on the dimension $d$, ideally to space complexity $\mathrm{poly}(\epsilon^{-1} d \log\Delta)$. Lammersen, Sidiropoulos, and Sohler [WADS 2009] proved that Euclidean Max-Cut admits dimension reduction with target dimension $d' = \mathrm{poly}(\epsilon^{-1})$. Combining this with the aforementioned algorithm that uses space $\exp(d')$, they obtain an algorithm whose overall space complexity is indeed polynomial in $d$, but unfortunately exponential in $\epsilon^{-1}$. We devise an alternative approach of \emph{data reduction}, based on importance sampling, and achieve space bound $\mathrm{poly}(\epsilon^{-1} d \log\Delta)$, which is exponentially better (in $\epsilon$) than the dimension-reduction approach. To implement this scheme in the streaming model, we employ a randomly-shifted quadtree to construct a tree embedding. While this is a well-known method, a key feature of our algorithm is that the embedding's distortion $O(d\log\Delta)$ affects only the space complexity, and the approximation ratio remains $1+\epsilon$.