90,007 research outputs found
Exploiting structure to cope with NP-hard graph problems: Polynomial and exponential time exact algorithms
An ideal algorithm for solving a particular problem always finds an optimal solution, finds such a solution for every possible instance, and finds it in polynomial time. When dealing with NP-hard problems, algorithms can only be expected to possess at most two out of these three desirable properties. All algorithms presented in this thesis are exact algorithms, which means that they always find an optimal solution. Demanding the solution to be optimal means that other concessions have to be made when designing an exact algorithm for an NP-hard problem: we either have to impose restrictions on the instances of the problem in order to achieve a polynomial time complexity, or we have to abandon the requirement that the worst-case running time has to be polynomial. In some cases, when the problem under consideration remains NP-hard on restricted input, we are even forced to do both.
Most of the problems studied in this thesis deal with partitioning the vertex set of a given graph. In the other problems the task is to find certain types of paths and cycles in graphs. The problems all have in common that they are NP-hard on general graphs. We present several polynomial time algorithms for solving restrictions of these problems to specific graph classes, in particular graphs without long induced paths, chordal graphs and claw-free graphs. For problems that remain NP-hard even on restricted input we present exact exponential time algorithms. In the design of each of our algorithms, structural graph properties have been heavily exploited. Apart from using existing structural results, we prove new structural properties of certain types of graphs in order to obtain our algorithmic results
Long Circuits and Large Euler Subgraphs
An undirected graph is Eulerian if it is connected and all its vertices are
of even degree. Similarly, a directed graph is Eulerian, if for each vertex its
in-degree is equal to its out-degree. It is well known that Eulerian graphs can
be recognized in polynomial time while the problems of finding a maximum
Eulerian subgraph or a maximum induced Eulerian subgraph are NP-hard. In this
paper, we study the parameterized complexity of the following Euler subgraph
problems:
- Large Euler Subgraph: For a given graph G and integer parameter k, does G
contain an induced Eulerian subgraph with at least k vertices?
- Long Circuit: For a given graph G and integer parameter k, does G contain
an Eulerian subgraph with at least k edges?
Our main algorithmic result is that Large Euler Subgraph is fixed parameter
tractable (FPT) on undirected graphs. We find this a bit surprising because the
problem of finding an induced Eulerian subgraph with exactly k vertices is
known to be W[1]-hard. The complexity of the problem changes drastically on
directed graphs. On directed graphs we obtained the following complexity
dichotomy: Large Euler Subgraph is NP-hard for every fixed k>3 and is solvable
in polynomial time for k<=3. For Long Circuit, we prove that the problem is FPT
on directed and undirected graphs
Graphs of Edge-Intersecting Non-Splitting Paths in a Tree: Representations of Holes-Part II
Given a tree and a set P of non-trivial simple paths on it, VPT(P) is the VPT
graph (i.e. the vertex intersection graph) of the paths P, and EPT(P) is the
EPT graph (i.e. the edge intersection graph) of P. These graphs have been
extensively studied in the literature. Given two (edge) intersecting paths in a
graph, their split vertices is the set of vertices having degree at least 3 in
their union. A pair of (edge) intersecting paths is termed non-splitting if
they do not have split vertices (namely if their union is a path). We define
the graph ENPT(P) of edge intersecting non-splitting paths of a tree, termed
the ENPT graph, as the graph having a vertex for each path in P, and an edge
between every pair of vertices representing two paths that are both
edge-intersecting and non-splitting. A graph G is an ENPT graph if there is a
tree T and a set of paths P of T such that G=ENPT(P), and we say that is
a representation of G.
Our goal is to characterize the representation of chordless ENPT cycles
(holes). To achieve this goal, we first assume that the EPT graph induced by
the vertices of an ENPT hole is given. In [2] we introduce three assumptions
(P1), (P2), (P3) defined on EPT, ENPT pairs of graphs. In the same study, we
define two problems HamiltonianPairRec, P3-HamiltonianPairRec and characterize
the representations of ENPT holes that satisfy (P1), (P2), (P3).
In this work, we continue our work by relaxing these three assumptions one by
one. We characterize the representations of ENPT holes satisfying (P3) by
providing a polynomial-time algorithm to solve P3-HamiltonianPairRec. We also
show that there does not exist a polynomial-time algorithm to solve
HamiltonianPairRec, unless P=NP
Long induced paths in graphs
We prove that every 3-connected planar graph on vertices contains an
induced path on vertices, which is best possible and improves
the best known lower bound by a multiplicative factor of . We
deduce that any planar graph (or more generally, any graph embeddable on a
fixed surface) with a path on vertices, also contains an induced path on
vertices. We conjecture that for any , there is a
contant such that any -degenerate graph with a path on vertices
also contains an induced path on vertices. We provide
examples showing that this order of magnitude would be best possible (already
for chordal graphs), and prove the conjecture in the case of interval graphs.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figures - revised versio
Long paths and cycles in random subgraphs of graphs with large minimum degree
For a given finite graph of minimum degree at least , let be a
random subgraph of obtained by taking each edge independently with
probability . We prove that (i) if for a function
that tends to infinity as does, then
asymptotically almost surely contains a cycle (and thus a path) of length at
least , and (ii) if , then
asymptotically almost surely contains a path of length at least . Our
theorems extend classical results on paths and cycles in the binomial random
graph, obtained by taking to be the complete graph on vertices.Comment: 26 page
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