Minimum Weight Perfect Matching via Blossom Belief Propagation
This provides a novel distributed algorithm for a fundamental combinatorial optimization problem, enabling systematic solutions in cases where previous belief propagation methods failed due to integrality gaps.
The paper tackles the problem of solving minimum weight perfect matching on arbitrary graphs when linear programming relaxations have an integrality gap, by developing Blossom-BP, a sequential belief propagation algorithm that guarantees termination in O(n^2) runs and offers a distributed version of Edmonds' Blossom algorithm.
Max-product Belief Propagation (BP) is a popular message-passing algorithm for computing a Maximum-A-Posteriori (MAP) assignment over a distribution represented by a Graphical Model (GM). It has been shown that BP can solve a number of combinatorial optimization problems including minimum weight matching, shortest path, network flow and vertex cover under the following common assumption: the respective Linear Programming (LP) relaxation is tight, i.e., no integrality gap is present. However, when LP shows an integrality gap, no model has been known which can be solved systematically via sequential applications of BP. In this paper, we develop the first such algorithm, coined Blossom-BP, for solving the minimum weight matching problem over arbitrary graphs. Each step of the sequential algorithm requires applying BP over a modified graph constructed by contractions and expansions of blossoms, i.e., odd sets of vertices. Our scheme guarantees termination in O(n^2) of BP runs, where n is the number of vertices in the original graph. In essence, the Blossom-BP offers a distributed version of the celebrated Edmonds' Blossom algorithm by jumping at once over many sub-steps with a single BP. Moreover, our result provides an interpretation of the Edmonds' algorithm as a sequence of LPs.