Thin trees for laminar families

In the laminar-constrained spanning tree problem, the goal is to find a minimum-cost spanning tree which respects upper bounds on the number of times each cut in a given laminar family is crossed. This generalizes the well-studied degree-bounded spanning tree problem, as well as a previously studied setting where a chain of cuts is given. We give the first constant-factor approximation algorithm; in particular we show how to obtain a multiplicative violation of the crossing bounds of less than 22 while losing less than a factor of 5 in terms of cost. Our result compares to the natural LP relaxation. As a consequence, our results show that given a k-edge-connected graph and a laminar family L⊆2V of cuts, there exists a spanning tree which contains only an O(1/k) fraction of the edges across every cut in L. This can be viewed as progress towards the Thin Tree Conjecture, which (in a strong form) states that this guarantee can be obtained for all cuts simultaneously.