On finding the Jaccard center

We initiate the study of finding the Jaccard center of a given collection N of sets. For two sets X,Y, the Jaccard index is defined as |X\cap Y|/|X\cup Y| and the corresponding distance is 1-|X\cap Y|/|X\cup Y|. The Jaccard center is a set C minimizing the maximum distance to any set of N. We show that the problem is NP-hard to solve exactly, and that it admits a PTAS while no FPTAS can exist unless P = NP. Furthermore, we show that the problem is fixed parameter tractable in the maximum Hamming norm between Jaccard center and any input set. Our algorithms are based on a compression technique similar in spirit to coresets for the Euclidean 1-center problem. In addition, we also show that, contrary to the previously studied median problem by Chierichetti et al. (SODA 2010), the continuous version of the Jaccard center problem admits a simple polynomial time algorithm.