Separating points by axis-parallel lines

We study the problem of separating n points in the plane, no two of which have the same x- or y-coordinate, using a minimum number of vertical and horizontal lines avoiding the points, so that each cell of the subdivision contains at most one point. Extending previous NP-hardness results due to Freimer et al. we prove that this problem and some variants of it are APX-hard. We give a 2-approximation algorithm for this problem, and a d-approximation algorithm for the d-dimensional variant, in which the points are to be separated using axis-parallel hyperplanes. To this end, we reduce the point separation problem to the rectangle stabbing problem studied by Gaur et al. Their approximation algorithm uses LP-rounding. We present an alternative LP-rounding procedure which also works for the rectangle stabbing problem. We show that the integrality ratio of the LP is exactly 2.