The Minimum Wiener Connector

The Wiener index of a graph is the sum of all pairwise shortest-path distances between its vertices. In this paper we study the novel problem of finding a minimum Wiener connector: given a connected graph $G=(V,E)$ and a set $Q\subseteq V$ of query vertices, find a subgraph of $G$ that connects all query vertices and has minimum Wiener index. We show that The Minimum Wiener Connector admits a polynomial-time (albeit impractical) exact algorithm for the special case where the number of query vertices is bounded. We show that in general the problem is NP-hard, and has no PTAS unless $\mathbf{P} = \mathbf{NP}$. Our main contribution is a constant-factor approximation algorithm running in time $\widetilde{O}(|Q||E|)$. A thorough experimentation on a large variety of real-world graphs confirms that our method returns smaller and denser solutions than other methods, and does so by adding to the query set $Q$ a small number of important vertices (i.e., vertices with high centrality).Comment: Published in Proceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Dat

On the Randi\'{c} index and conditional parameters of a graph

The aim of this paper is to study some parameters of simple graphs related with the degree of the vertices. So, our main tool is the $n\times n$ matrix ${\cal A}$ whose ($i,j$)-entry is $$a_{ij}= \left\lbrace \begin{array}{ll} \frac{1}{\sqrt{\delta_i\delta_j}} & {\rm if }\quad v_i\sim v_j ; \\ 0 & {\rm otherwise,} \end{array} \right.$$ where $\delta_i$ denotes the degree of the vertex $v_i$. We study the Randi\'{c} index and some interesting particular cases of conditional excess, conditional Wiener index, and conditional diameter. In particular, using the matrix ${\cal A}$ or its eigenvalues, we obtain tight bounds on the studied parameters.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:math/060243

Cacti with Extremal PI Index

The vertex PI index $PI(G) = \sum_{xy \in E(G)} [n_{xy}(x) + n_{xy}(y)]$ is a distance-based molecular structure descriptor, where $n_{xy}(x)$ denotes the number of vertices which are closer to the vertex $x$ than to the vertex $y$ and which has been the considerable research in computational chemistry dating back to Harold Wiener in 1947. A connected graph is a cactus if any two of its cycles have at most one common vertex. In this paper, we completely determine the extremal graphs with the largest and smallest vertex PI indices among all the cacti. As a consequence, we obtain the sharp bounds with corresponding extremal cacti and extend a known result.Comment: Accepted by Transactions on Combinatorics, 201