5,139 research outputs found
Algorithmic Meta-Theorems
Algorithmic meta-theorems are general algorithmic results applying to a whole
range of problems, rather than just to a single problem alone. They often have
a "logical" and a "structural" component, that is they are results of the form:
every computational problem that can be formalised in a given logic L can be
solved efficiently on every class C of structures satisfying certain
conditions. This paper gives a survey of algorithmic meta-theorems obtained in
recent years and the methods used to prove them. As many meta-theorems use
results from graph minor theory, we give a brief introduction to the theory
developed by Robertson and Seymour for their proof of the graph minor theorem
and state the main algorithmic consequences of this theory as far as they are
needed in the theory of algorithmic meta-theorems
Boundary properties of graphs
A set of graphs may acquire various desirable properties, if we apply suitable restrictions
on the set. We investigate the following two questions: How far, exactly, must one restrict
the structure of a graph to obtain a certain interesting property? What kind of tools are
helpful to classify sets of graphs into those which satisfy a property and those that do not?
Equipped with a containment relation, a graph class is a special example of a partially
ordered set. We introduce the notion of a boundary ideal as a generalisation of a notion
introduced by Alekseev in 2003, to provide a tool to indicate whether a partially ordered set
satisfies a desirable property or not. This tool can give a complete characterisation of lower
ideals defined by a finite forbidden set, into those that satisfy the given property and to
those that do not. In the case of graphs, a lower ideal with respect to the induced subgraph
relation is known as a hereditary graph class.
We study three interrelated types of properties for hereditary graph classes: the existence
of an efficient solution to an algorithmic graph problem, the boundedness of the graph
parameter known as clique-width, and well-quasi-orderability by the induced subgraph relation.
It was shown by Courcelle, Makowsky and Rotics in 2000 that, for a graph class, boundedness
of clique-width immediately implies an efficient solution to a wide range of algorithmic
problems. This serves as one of the motivations to study clique-width. As for well-quasiorderability,
we conjecture that every hereditary graph class that is well-quasi-ordered by
the induced subgraph relation also has bounded clique-width.
We discover the first boundary classes for several algorithmic graph problems, including
the Hamiltonian cycle problem. We also give polynomial-time algorithms for the dominating
induced matching problem, for some restricted graph classes.
After discussing the special importance of bipartite graphs in the study of clique-width,
we describe a general framework for constructing bipartite graphs of large clique-width. As
a consequence, we find a new minimal class of unbounded clique-width.
We prove numerous positive and negative results regarding the well-quasi-orderability of
classes of bipartite graphs. This completes a characterisation of the well-quasi-orderability of
all classes of bipartite graphs defined by one forbidden induced bipartite subgraph. We also
make considerable progress in characterising general graph classes defined by two forbidden
induced subgraphs, reducing the task to a small finite number of open cases. Finally, we
show that, in general, for hereditary graph classes defined by a forbidden set of bounded
finite size, a similar reduction is not usually possible, but the number of boundary classes
to determine well-quasi-orderability is nevertheless finite.
Our results, together with the notion of boundary ideals, are also relevant for the study
of other partially ordered sets in mathematics, such as permutations ordered by the pattern
containment relation
The Generalised Colouring Numbers on Classes of Bounded Expansion
The generalised colouring numbers , ,
and were introduced by Kierstead and Yang as
generalisations of the usual colouring number, also known as the degeneracy of
a graph, and have since then found important applications in the theory of
bounded expansion and nowhere dense classes of graphs, introduced by
Ne\v{s}et\v{r}il and Ossona de Mendez. In this paper, we study the relation of
the colouring numbers with two other measures that characterise nowhere dense
classes of graphs, namely with uniform quasi-wideness, studied first by Dawar
et al. in the context of preservation theorems for first-order logic, and with
the splitter game, introduced by Grohe et al. We show that every graph
excluding a fixed topological minor admits a universal order, that is, one
order witnessing that the colouring numbers are small for every value of .
Finally, we use our construction of such orders to give a new proof of a result
of Eickmeyer and Kawarabayashi, showing that the model-checking problem for
successor-invariant first-order formulas is fixed-parameter tractable on
classes of graphs with excluded topological minors
The Parameterized Complexity of Degree Constrained Editing Problems
This thesis examines degree constrained editing problems within the framework of parameterized complexity. A degree constrained editing problem takes as input a graph and a set of constraints and asks whether the graph can be altered in at most k editing steps such that the degrees of the remaining vertices are within the given constraints. Parameterized complexity gives a framework for examining
problems that are traditionally considered intractable and developing efficient exact algorithms for them, or showing that it is unlikely that they have such algorithms, by introducing an additional component to the input, the parameter, which gives additional information about the structure of the problem. If the problem has an algorithm that is exponential in the parameter, but polynomial, with constant degree, in the size of the input, then it is considered to be fixed-parameter tractable.
Parameterized complexity also provides an intractability framework for identifying problems that are likely to not have such an algorithm.
Degree constrained editing problems provide natural parameterizations in terms of the total cost k of vertex deletions, edge deletions and edge additions allowed, and
the upper bound r on the degree of the vertices remaining after editing. We define a class of degree constrained editing problems, WDCE, which generalises several well know problems, such as Degree r Deletion, Cubic Subgraph, r-Regular Subgraph, f-Factor and General Factor. We show that in general if both k and r are part of the parameter, problems in the WDCE class are fixed-parameter tractable, and if parameterized by k or r alone, the problems are intractable in a parameterized sense.
We further show cases of WDCE that have polynomial time kernelizations, and in particular when all the degree constraints are a single number and the editing
operations include vertex deletion and edge deletion we show that there is a kernel with at most O(kr(k + r)) vertices. If we allow vertex deletion and edge addition,
we show that despite remaining fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized by k and r together, the problems are unlikely to have polynomial sized kernelizations, or
polynomial time kernelizations of a certain form, under certain complexity theoretic assumptions.
We also examine a more general case where given an input graph the question is whether with at most k deletions the graph can be made r-degenerate. We show that in this case the problems are intractable, even when r is a constant
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