An instance of colorful k-center consists of points in a metric space that are colored red or blue, along with an integer k and a coverage requirement for each color. The goal is to find the smallest radius ρ such that there exist balls of radius ρ around k of the points that meet the coverage requirements. The motivation behind this problem is twofold. First, from fairness considerations: each color/group should receive a similar service guarantee, and second, from the algorithmic challenges it poses: this problem combines the difficulties of clustering along with the subset-sum problem. In particular, we show that this combination results in strong integrality gap lower bounds for several natural linear programming relaxations. Our main result is an efficient approximation algorithm that overcomes these difficulties to achieve an approximation guarantee of 3, nearly matching the tight approximation guarantee of 2 for the classical k-center problem which this problem generalizes. * A preliminary version of this work was presented at the 21st Conference on Integer Programming and Combinatorial Optimization (IPCO 2020). An independent work of Anegg et al. [2], presented at the same venue, gave a 4-approximation for Colorful k-Center with constantly many colors using different techniques. This work is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation project 200021-184656 "Randomness in Problem Instances and Randomized Algorithms."

An instance of colorfulk-center consists of points in a metric space that are colored red or blue, along with an integer k and a coverage requirement for each color. The goal is to find the smallest radius $$\rho $$ ρ such that there exist balls of radius $$\rho $$ ρ around k of the points that meet the coverage requirements. The motivation behind this problem is twofold. First, from fairness considerations: each color/group should receive a similar service guarantee, and second, from the algorithmic challenges it poses: this problem combines the difficulties of clustering along with the subset-sum problem. In particular, we show that this combination results in strong integrality gap lower bounds for several natural linear programming relaxations. Our main result is an efficient approximation algorithm that overcomes these difficulties to achieve an approximation guarantee of 3, nearly matching the tight approximation guarantee of 2 for the classical k-center problem which this problem generalizes. algorithms either opened more than k centers or only worked in the special case when the input points are in the plane.

In the Non-Uniform k-Center problem we need to cover a finite metric space using k balls of different radii that can be scaled uniformly. The goal is to minimize the scaling factor. If the number of different radii is unbounded, the problem does not admit a constant-factor approximation algorithm but it has been conjectured that such an algorithm exists if the number of radii is constant. Yet, this is known only for the case of two radii. Our first contribution is a simple black box reduction which shows that if one can handle the variant of t − 1 radii with outliers, then one can also handle t radii. Together with an algorithm by Chakrabarty and Negahbani for two radii with outliers, this immediately implies a constant-factor approximation algorithm for three radii; thus making further progress on the conjecture. Furthermore, using algorithms for the k-center with outliers problem, that is the one radii with outliers case, we also get a simple algorithm for two radii.The algorithm by Chakrabarty and Negahbani uses a top-down approach, starting with the larger radius and then proceeding to the smaller one. Our reduction, on the other hand, looks only at the smallest radius and eliminates it, which suggests that a bottom-up approach is promising. In this spirit, we devise a modification of the Chakrabarty and Negahbani algorithm which runs in a bottom-up fashion, and in this way we recover their result with the advantage of having a simpler analysis.

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