Diameter Spanner, Eccentricity Spanner, and Approximating Extremal Graph Distances: Static, Dynamic, and Fault Tolerant.

TL;DR: This work presents the first non-trivial algorithm for maintaining `< 2'- approximation of graph diameter in dynamic setting, and presents several other extremal-distance spanners with various size-stretch trade-offs.

Abstract: The diameter, vertex eccentricities, and the radius of a graph are some of the most fundamental graph parameters. Roditty and Williams [STOC 2013] gave an $O(m\sqrt{n})$ time algorithm for computing a 1.5 approximation of graph diameter. We present the first non-trivial algorithm for maintaining `< 2'- approximation of graph diameter in dynamic setting. Our algorithm maintain a $(1.5+\epsilon)$ approximation of graph diameter that takes amortized update time of $O(\epsilon^{-1}n^{1.25})$ in partially dynamic setting. For graphs whose diameter remains bounded by some large constant, the total amortized time of our algorithm is $O(\epsilon^{-2}\sqrt{n})$, which almost matches the best known bound for static $1.5$-approximation of diameter. Backurs et al. [STOC 2018] gave an $\tilde O(m\sqrt{n})$ time algorithm for computing 2-approximation of eccentricities. They also showed that no $O(n^{2-o(1)})$ time algorithm can achieve an approximation factor better than $2$ for graph eccentricities, unless SETH fails. We present the $\tilde O(m)$ time algorithm for computing $2$-approximation of vertex eccentricities in directed weighted graphs. We also present fault tolerant data-structures for maintaining $1.5$-diameter and $2$-eccentricities. We initiate the study of Extremal Distance Spanners. Given a graph G=(V,E), a subgraph H=(V,E0) is defined to be a {\em $t$-diameter-spanner} if the diameter of $H$ is at most $t$ times the diameter of $G$. We show that for any $n$-vertex directed graph $G$ we can compute a sparse subgraph $H$ which is a $(1.5)$-diameter-spanner of $G$ and contains at most $O(n^{1.5})$ edges. We also show that this bound is tight for graphs whose diameter is bounded by $n^{1/4-\epsilon}$. We present several other extremal-distance spanners with various size-stretch trade-offs. Finally, we extensively study these objects in the dynamic and fault-tolerant settings.