A note on Johnson, Minkoff and Phillips' algorithm for the Prize-Collecting Steiner Tree Problem

Abstract

The primal-dual scheme has been used to provide approximation algorithms for many problems. Goemans and Williamson gave a (2-1/(n-1))-approximation for the Prize-Collecting Steiner Tree Problem that runs in O(n^3 log n) time. it applies the primal-dual scheme once for each of the n vertices of the graph. Johnson, Minkoff and Phillips proposed a faster implementation of Goemans and Williamson's algorithm. We give a proof that the approximation ratio of this implementation is exactly 2.