On a generalization of iterated and randomized rounding

Abstract

We give a general method for rounding linear programs that combines the commonly used iterated rounding and randomized rounding techniques. In particular, we show that whenever iterated rounding can be applied to a problem with some slack, there is a randomized procedure that returns an integral solution that satis\xef\xac\x81es the guarantees of iterated rounding and also has concentration properties. We use this to give new results for several classic problems such as rounding column-sparse LPs, makespan minimization on unrelated machines, degree-bounded spanning trees and multi-budgeted matchings