An Efficient Partitioning Oracle for Bounded-Treewidth Graphs

Partitioning oracles were introduced by Hassidim et al. (FOCS 2009) as a generic tool for constant-time algorithms. For any epsilon > 0, a partitioning oracle provides query access to a fixed partition of the input bounded-degree minor-free graph, in which every component has size poly(1/epsilon), and the number of edges removed is at most epsilon*n, where n is the number of vertices in the graph. However, the oracle of Hassidimet al. makes an exponential number of queries to the input graph to answer every query about the partition. In this paper, we construct an efficient partitioning oracle for graphs with constant treewidth. The oracle makes only O(poly(1/epsilon)) queries to the input graph to answer each query about the partition. Examples of bounded-treewidth graph classes include k-outerplanar graphs for fixed k, series-parallel graphs, cactus graphs, and pseudoforests. Our oracle yields poly(1/epsilon)-time property testing algorithms for membership in these classes of graphs. Another application of the oracle is a poly(1/epsilon)-time algorithm that approximates the maximum matching size, the minimum vertex cover size, and the minimum dominating set size up to an additive epsilon*n in graphs with bounded treewidth. Finally, the oracle can be used to test in poly(1/epsilon) time whether the input bounded-treewidth graph is k-colorable or perfect.Comment: Full version of a paper to appear in RANDOM 201

What does the local structure of a planar graph tell us about its global structure?

The local k-neighborhood of a vertex v in an unweighted graph G = (V,E) with vertex set V and edge set E is the subgraph induced by all vertices of distance at most k from v. The rooted k-neighborhood of v is also called a k-disk around vertex v. If a graph has maximum degree bounded by a constant d, and k is also constant, the number of isomorphism classes of k-disks is constant as well. We can describe the local structure of a bounded-degree graph G by counting the number of isomorphic copies in G of each possible k-disk. We can summarize this information in form of a vector that has an entry for each isomorphism class of k-disks. The value of the entry is the number of isomorphic copies of the corresponding k-disk in G. We call this vector frequency vector of k-disks. If we only know this vector, what does it tell us about the structure of G? In this paper we will survey a series of papers in the area of Property Testing that leads to the following result (stated informally): There is a k = k(ε,d) such that for any planar graph G its local structure (described by the frequency vector of k-disks) determines G up to insertion and deletion of at most εd n edges (and relabelling of vertices)

A Quasi-Polynomial Time Partition Oracle for Graphs with an Excluded Minor

Motivated by the problem of testing planarity and related properties, we study the problem of designing efficient {\em partition oracles}. A {\em partition oracle} is a procedure that, given access to the incidence lists representation of a bounded-degree graph $G= (V,E)$ and a parameter \eps, when queried on a vertex $v\in V$, returns the part (subset of vertices) which $v$ belongs to in a partition of all graph vertices. The partition should be such that all parts are small, each part is connected, and if the graph has certain properties, the total number of edges between parts is at most \eps |V|. In this work we give a partition oracle for graphs with excluded minors whose query complexity is quasi-polynomial in 1/\eps, thus improving on the result of Hassidim et al. ({\em Proceedings of FOCS 2009}) who gave a partition oracle with query complexity exponential in 1/\eps. This improvement implies corresponding improvements in the complexity of testing planarity and other properties that are characterized by excluded minors as well as sublinear-time approximation algorithms that work under the promise that the graph has an excluded minor.Comment: 13 pages, 1 figur

Vertex-Coloring with Star-Defects

Defective coloring is a variant of traditional vertex-coloring, according to which adjacent vertices are allowed to have the same color, as long as the monochromatic components induced by the corresponding edges have a certain structure. Due to its important applications, as for example in the bipartisation of graphs, this type of coloring has been extensively studied, mainly with respect to the size, degree, and acyclicity of the monochromatic components. In this paper we focus on defective colorings in which the monochromatic components are acyclic and have small diameter, namely, they form stars. For outerplanar graphs, we give a linear-time algorithm to decide if such a defective coloring exists with two colors and, in the positive case, to construct one. Also, we prove that an outerpath (i.e., an outerplanar graph whose weak-dual is a path) always admits such a two-coloring. Finally, we present NP-completeness results for non-planar and planar graphs of bounded degree for the cases of two and three colors