We present a general approximation technique for a large class of graph problems. Our technique mostly applies to problems of covering, at minimum cost, the vertices of a graph with trees, cycles, or paths satisfying certain requirements. In particular, many basic combinatorial optimization

monotonicity properties to ensure truthfulness. Since most of the known approximation techniques do not fulfill these properties, we study alternative techniques. Our first contribution is a quite general method to transform a pseudopolynomial algorithm into a monotone FPTAS. This can be applied to various

We survey the current techniques to cope with the problem of string matching allowing errors. This is becoming a more and more relevant issue for many fast growing areas such as information retrieval and computational biology. We focus on online searching and mostly on edit distance, explaining

We present randomized approximation algorithms for the maximum cut (MAX CUT) and maximum 2-satisfiability (MAX 2SAT) problems that always deliver solutions of expected value at least .87856 times the optimal value. These algorithms use a simple and elegant technique that randomly rounds

comes from the role of the Laplacian op erator in providing an optimal emb edding. Th e Laplacian of the graph obtained from the data points may be viewed as an approximation to the Laplace-Beltrami operator defined on the manifold. The emb edding maps for the data come from approximations to a natural

An approach to the construction of classifiers from imbalanced datasets is described. A dataset is imbalanced if the classification categories are not approximately equally represented. Often real-world data sets are predominately composed of ``normal'' examples with only a small

joins and range queries. Our techniques can be constructed in a single scan over the input, handle inserts and deletes to the database incrementally, and hence they can also be used for processing of streaming spatial data. In contrast to previous approaches, our techniques return approximate results

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also present approximation techniques for dealing with systems for which the iterative procedures do not converge.

A note on approximation techniques used for process optimization