Approximating submodular $k$-partition via principal partition sequence

In submodular $k$-partition, the input is a non-negative submodular function $f$ defined over a finite ground set $V$ (given by an evaluation oracle) along with a positive integer $k$ and the goal is to find a partition of the ground set $V$ into $k$ non-empty parts $V_1, V_2, ..., V_k$ in order to minimize $\sum_{i=1}^k f(V_i)$. Narayanan, Roy, and Patkar (Journal of Algorithms, 1996) designed an algorithm for submodular $k$-partition based on the principal partition sequence and showed that the approximation factor of their algorithm is $2$ for the special case of graph cut functions (subsequently rediscovered by Ravi and Sinha (Journal of Operational Research, 2008)). In this work, we study the approximation factor of their algorithm for three subfamilies of submodular functions -- monotone, symmetric, and posimodular, and show the following results: 1. The approximation factor of their algorithm for monotone submodular $k$-partition is $4/3$. This result improves on the $2$-factor achievable via other algorithms. Moreover, our upper bound of $4/3$ matches the recently shown lower bound under polynomial number of function evaluation queries (Santiago, IWOCA 2021). Our upper bound of $4/3$ is also the first improvement beyond $2$ for a certain graph partitioning problem that is a special case of monotone submodular $k$-partition. 2. The approximation factor of their algorithm for symmetric submodular $k$-partition is $2$. This result generalizes their approximation factor analysis beyond graph cut functions. 3. The approximation factor of their algorithm for posimodular submodular $k$-partition is $2$. We also construct an example to show that the approximation factor of their algorithm for arbitrary submodular functions is $Ω(n/k)$.