Optimality of belief propagation for random assignment problem

Year
2009
Type(s)
Author(s)
J. Salez, D.Shah
Source
Proceeding SODA '09 Proceedings of the twentieth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms, Pages 187-196
Url
https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1496792

The assignment problem concerns finding the minimum-cost perfect matching in a complete weighted n x n bipartite graph. Any algorithm for this classical question clearly requires Ω(n2) time, and the best known one (Edmonds and Karp, 1972) finds solution in O(n3). For decades, it has remained unknown whether optimal computation time is closer to n3 or n2. We provide answer to this question for random instance of assignment problem. Specifically, we establish that Belief Propagation finds solution in O(n2) time when edge-weights are i.i.d. with light tailed distribution.