N-free extensions of posets.Note on a theorem of P.A.Grillet

Let $S\_{N}(P)$ be the poset obtained by adding a dummy vertex on each diagonal edge of the $N$'s of a finite poset $P$. We show that $S\_{N}(S\_{N}(P))$ is $N$-free. It follows that this poset is the smallest $N$-free barycentric subdivision of the diagram of $P$, poset whose existence was proved by P.A. Grillet. This is also the poset obtained by the algorithm starting with $P\_0:=P$ and consisting at step $m$ of adding a dummy vertex on a diagonal edge of some $N$ in $P\_m$, proving that the result of this algorithm does not depend upon the particular choice of the diagonal edge choosen at each step. These results are linked to drawing of posets.Comment: 7 pages, 4 picture

Infinite cographs and chain complete N-free posets

We give a necessary and sufficient condition for a $P_4$-free graph to be a cograph. This allows us to obtain a simple proof of the fact that finite $P_4$-free graphs are finite cographs. We also prove that chain complete posets whose comparability graph is a cograph are series-parallel.Comment: 7 page

Unavoidable induced subgraphs in large graphs with no homogeneous sets

A homogeneous set of an $n$-vertex graph is a set $X$ of vertices ($2\le |X|\le n-1$) such that every vertex not in $X$ is either complete or anticomplete to $X$. A graph is called prime if it has no homogeneous set. A chain of length $t$ is a sequence of $t+1$ vertices such that for every vertex in the sequence except the first one, its immediate predecessor is its unique neighbor or its unique non-neighbor among all of its predecessors. We prove that for all $n$, there exists $N$ such that every prime graph with at least $N$ vertices contains one of the following graphs or their complements as an induced subgraph: (1) the graph obtained from $K_{1,n}$ by subdividing every edge once, (2) the line graph of $K_{2,n}$, (3) the line graph of the graph in (1), (4) the half-graph of height $n$, (5) a prime graph induced by a chain of length $n$, (6) two particular graphs obtained from the half-graph of height $n$ by making one side a clique and adding one vertex.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figure

Irreducible pairings and indecomposable tournaments

We only consider finite structures. With every totally ordered set $V$ and a subset $P$ of $\binom{V}{2}$, we associate the underlying tournament ${\rm Inv}(\underline{V}, P)$ obtained from the transitive tournament $\underline{V}:=(V, \{(x,y) \in V \times V : x < y \})$ by reversing $P$, i.e., by reversing the arcs $(x,y)$ such that $\{x,y\} \in P$. The subset $P$ is a pairing (of $\cup P$) if $|\cup P| = 2|P|$, a quasi-pairing (of $\cup P$) if $|\cup P| = 2|P|-1$; it is irreducible if no nontrivial interval of $\cup P$ is a union of connected components of the graph $(\cup P, P)$. In this paper, we consider pairings and quasi-pairings in relation to tournaments. We establish close relationships between irreducibility of pairings (or quasi-pairings) and indecomposability of their underlying tournaments under modular decomposition. For example, given a pairing $P$ of a totally ordered set $V$ of size at least $6$, the pairing $P$ is irreducible if and only if the tournament ${\rm Inv}(\underline{V}, P)$ is indecomposable. This is a consequence of a more general result characterizing indecomposable tournaments obtained from transitive tournaments by reversing pairings. We obtain analogous results in the case of quasi-pairings.Comment: 17 page

On minimal prime graphs and posets

We show that there are four infinite prime graphs such that every infinite prime graph with no infinite clique embeds one of these graphs. We derive a similar result for infinite prime posets with no infinite chain or no infinite antichain

A survey on algorithmic aspects of modular decomposition

The modular decomposition is a technique that applies but is not restricted to graphs. The notion of module naturally appears in the proofs of many graph theoretical theorems. Computing the modular decomposition tree is an important preprocessing step to solve a large number of combinatorial optimization problems. Since the first polynomial time algorithm in the early 70's, the algorithmic of the modular decomposition has known an important development. This paper survey the ideas and techniques that arose from this line of research

Graphs whose indecomposability graph is 2-covered

Given a graph $G=(V,E)$, a subset $X$ of $V$ is an interval of $G$ provided that for any $a, b\in X$ and $x\in V \setminus X$, $\{a,x\}\in E$ if and only if $\{b,x\}\in E$. For example, $\emptyset$, $\{x\}(x\in V)$ and $V$ are intervals of $G$, called trivial intervals. A graph whose intervals are trivial is indecomposable; otherwise, it is decomposable. According to Ille, the indecomposability graph of an undirected indecomposable graph $G$ is the graph $\mathbb I(G)$ whose vertices are those of $G$ and edges are the unordered pairs of distinct vertices $\{x,y\}$ such that the induced subgraph $G[V \setminus \{x,y\}]$ is indecomposable. We characterize the indecomposable graphs $G$ whose $\mathbb I(G)$ admits a vertex cover of size 2.Comment: 31 pages, 5 figure

More on discrete convexity

In several recent papers some concepts of convex analysis were extended to discrete sets. This paper is one more step in this direction. It is well known that a local minimum of a convex function is always its global minimum. We study some discrete objects that share this property and provide several examples of convex families related to graphs and to two-person games in normal form

Fully polynomial FPT algorithms for some classes of bounded clique-width graphs

Parameterized complexity theory has enabled a refined classification of the difficulty of NP-hard optimization problems on graphs with respect to key structural properties, and so to a better understanding of their true difficulties. More recently, hardness results for problems in P were achieved using reasonable complexity theoretic assumptions such as: Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis (SETH), 3SUM and All-Pairs Shortest-Paths (APSP). According to these assumptions, many graph theoretic problems do not admit truly subquadratic algorithms, nor even truly subcubic algorithms (Williams and Williams, FOCS 2010 and Abboud, Grandoni, Williams, SODA 2015). A central technique used to tackle the difficulty of the above mentioned problems is fixed-parameter algorithms for polynomial-time problems with polynomial dependency in the fixed parameter (P-FPT). This technique was introduced by Abboud, Williams and Wang in SODA 2016 and continued by Husfeldt (IPEC 2016) and Fomin et al. (SODA 2017), using the treewidth as a parameter. Applying this technique to clique-width, another important graph parameter, remained to be done. In this paper we study several graph theoretic problems for which hardness results exist such as cycle problems (triangle detection, triangle counting, girth, diameter), distance problems (diameter, eccentricities, Gromov hyperbolicity, betweenness centrality) and maximum matching. We provide hardness results and fully polynomial FPT algorithms, using clique-width and some of its upper-bounds as parameters (split-width, modular-width and $P\_4$-sparseness). We believe that our most important result is an ${\cal O}(k^4 \cdot n + m)$-time algorithm for computing a maximum matching where $k$ is either the modular-width or the $P\_4$-sparseness. The latter generalizes many algorithms that have been introduced so far for specific subclasses such as cographs, $P\_4$-lite graphs, $P\_4$-extendible graphs and $P\_4$-tidy graphs. Our algorithms are based on preprocessing methods using modular decomposition, split decomposition and primeval decomposition. Thus they can also be generalized to some graph classes with unbounded clique-width