1 research outputs found
Digraph Coloring and Distance to Acyclicity
In -Digraph Coloring we are given a digraph and are asked to partition its
vertices into at most sets, so that each set induces a DAG. This well-known
problem is NP-hard, as it generalizes (undirected) -Coloring, but becomes
trivial if the input digraph is acyclic. This poses the natural parameterized
complexity question what happens when the input is "almost" acyclic. In this
paper we study this question using parameters that measure the input's distance
to acyclicity in either the directed or the undirected sense.
It is already known that, for all , -Digraph Coloring is NP-hard
on digraphs of DFVS at most . We strengthen this result to show that, for
all , -Digraph Coloring is NP-hard for DFVS . Refining our
reduction we obtain two further consequences: (i) for all , -Digraph
Coloring is NP-hard for graphs of feedback arc set (FAS) at most ;
interestingly, this leads to a dichotomy, as we show that the problem is FPT by
if FAS is at most ; (ii) -Digraph Coloring is NP-hard for graphs
of DFVS , even if the maximum degree is at most ; we show
that this is also almost tight, as the problem becomes FPT for DFVS and
.
We then consider parameters that measure the distance from acyclicity of the
underlying graph. We show that -Digraph Coloring admits an FPT algorithm
parameterized by treewidth, whose parameter dependence is . Then,
we pose the question of whether the factor can be eliminated. Our main
contribution in this part is to settle this question in the negative and show
that our algorithm is essentially optimal, even for the much more restricted
parameter treedepth and for . Specifically, we show that an FPT algorithm
solving -Digraph Coloring with dependence would contradict the
ETH