Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

submittedVersion

Publication Date

7-2011

Abstract

Balanced multi-way number partitioning (BMNP) seeks to split a collection of numbers into subsets with (roughly) the same cardinality and subset sum. The problem is NP-hard, and there are several exact and approximate algorithms for it. However, existing exact algorithms solve only the simpler, balanced two-way number partitioning variant, whereas the most effective approximate algorithm, BLDM, may produce widely varying subset sums. In this paper, we introduce the LRM algorithm that lowers the expected spread in subset sums to one third that of BLDM for uniformly distributed numbers and odd subset cardinalities. We also propose Meld, a novel strategy for skewed number distributions. A combination of LRM and Meld leads to a heuristic technique that consistently achieves a narrower spread of subset sums than BLDM.

Keywords

Approximate algorithms, Cardinalities, Exact algorithms, Heuristic techniques, Novel strategies, Number distribution, Number partitioning, Subset sum

Discipline

Databases and Information Systems | Theory and Algorithms

Publication

Proceedings of the Twenty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-11: Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, 16 - 22 July 2011

First Page

693

Last Page

698

ISBN

9781577355137

Identifier

10.5591/978-1-57735-516-8/IJCAI11-122

Publisher

AAAI Press

City or Country

Menlo Park, CA

Additional URL

http://dx.doi.org/10.5591/978-1-57735-516-8/IJCAI11-122

Download

Share

COinS