Dynamic Facility Location in High Dimensional Euclidean Spaces

Abstract

We study the facility location problem in the dynamic setting, where the goal is to efficiently process an intermixed sequence of point insertions and deletions while maintaining a high quality and stable solution. Although the problem has been studied in the context of general metrics and low-dimensional spaces, much remains unknown concerning dynamic facility location in high dimensional spaces. In this work, we present the first fully dynamic algorithm for facility location in high-dimensional spaces $\mathbb{R}^{d}$. For any $c \geq 1$, our algorithm achieves $O(c)$-approximation, supports point updates in $\tilde{O}(\mathrm{poly}(d)n^{1/c + o(1)})$ amortized time and incurs $O(1)$ amortized recourse. More generally, our result shows that despite the linear-time lower bound on the update time for general metrics, it is possible to achieve sub-linear update times for metric spaces that admit dynamic nearest neighbour oracles. Experiments on real datasets confirm that our algorithm achieves high-quality solutions with low running time, and incurs minimal recourse.