Beyond the Worst-Case Analysis of Algorithms

Download or read book Beyond the Worst-Case Analysis of Algorithms written by Tim Roughgarden and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-14 with total page 705 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are no silver bullets in algorithm design, and no single algorithmic idea is powerful and flexible enough to solve every computational problem. Nor are there silver bullets in algorithm analysis, as the most enlightening method for analyzing an algorithm often depends on the problem and the application. However, typical algorithms courses rely almost entirely on a single analysis framework, that of worst-case analysis, wherein an algorithm is assessed by its worst performance on any input of a given size. The purpose of this book is to popularize several alternatives to worst-case analysis and their most notable algorithmic applications, from clustering to linear programming to neural network training. Forty leading researchers have contributed introductions to different facets of this field, emphasizing the most important models and results, many of which can be taught in lectures to beginning graduate students in theoretical computer science and machine learning.