1 research outputs found
Separator Theorems for Minor-Free and Shallow Minor-Free Graphs with Applications
Alon, Seymour, and Thomas generalized Lipton and Tarjan's planar separator
theorem and showed that a -minor free graph with vertices has a
separator of size at most . They gave an algorithm that, given
a graph with edges and vertices and given an integer ,
outputs in time such a separator or a -minor of .
Plotkin, Rao, and Smith gave an time algorithm to find a
separator of size . Kawarabayashi and Reed improved the
bound on the size of the separator to and gave an algorithm that
finds such a separator in time for any constant , assuming is constant. This algorithm has an extremely large
dependency on in the running time (some power tower of whose height is
itself a function of ), making it impractical even for small . We are
interested in a small polynomial time dependency on and we show how to find
an -size separator or report that has a -minor in
O(\poly(h)n^{5/4 + \epsilon}) time for any constant . We also
present the first O(\poly(h)n) time algorithm to find a separator of size
for a constant . As corollaries of our results, we get improved
algorithms for shortest paths and maximum matching. Furthermore, for integers
and , we give an time algorithm that
either produces a -minor of depth or a separator of size
at most . This improves the shallow minor algorithm
of Plotkin, Rao, and Smith when . We get a
similar running time improvement for an approximation algorithm for the problem
of finding a largest -minor in a given graph.Comment: To appear at FOCS 201