A Dense Hierarchy of Sublinear Time Approximation Schemes for Bin Packing

Richard Beigel, Bin Fu

The bin packing problem is to find the minimum number of bins of size one to pack a list of items with sizes $a_1,..., a_n$ in $(0,1]$. Using uniform sampling, which selects a random element from the input list each time, we develop a randomized $O({n(\log n)(\log\log n)\over \sum_{i=1}^n a_i}+({1\over \epsilon})^{O({1\over\epsilon})})$ time $(1+\epsilon)$-approximation scheme for the bin packing problem. We show that every randomized algorithm with uniform random sampling needs $\Omega({n\over \sum_{i=1}^n a_i})$ time to give an $(1+\epsilon)$-approximation. For each function $s(n): N\rightarrow N$, define $\sum(s(n))$ to be the set of all bin packing problems with the sum of item sizes equal to $s(n)$. For a constant $b\in (0,1)$, every problem in $\sum(n^{b})$ has an $O(n^{1-b}(\log n)(\log\log n)+({1\over \epsilon})^{O({1\over\epsilon})})$ time $(1+\epsilon)$-approximation for an arbitrary constant $\epsilon$. On the other hand, there is no $o(n^{1-b})$ time $(1+\epsilon)$-approximation scheme for the bin packing problems in $\sum(n^{b})$ for some constant $\epsilon>0$.

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