Abstract

Approximation algorithms have so far mainly been studied for problems that are not known to have polynomial time algorithms for solving them exactly. Here we propose an approximation algorithm for the weighted matching problem in graphs which can be solved in polynomial time. The weighted matching problem is to find a matching in an edge weighted graph that has maximum weight. The first polynomial time algorithm for this problem was given by Edmonds in 1965. The fastest known algorithm for the weighted matching problem has a running time of O(nm+n 2 log n). Many real world problems require graphs of such large size that this running time is too costly. Therefore there is considerable need for faster approximation algorithms for the weighted matching problem. We present a linear time approximation algorithm for the weighted matching problem with a performance ratio arbitrarily close to 2/3

Citations