4 research outputs found
Tangles and Single Linkage Hierarchical Clustering
We establish a connection between tangles, a concept from structural graph theory that plays a central role in Robertson and Seymour\u27s graph minor project, and hierarchical clustering. Tangles cannot only be defined for graphs, but in fact for arbitrary connectivity functions, which are functions defined on the subsets of some finite universe, which in typical clustering applications consists of points in some metric space.
Connectivity functions are usually required to be submodular. It is our first contribution to show that the central duality theorem connecting tangles with hierarchical decompositions (so-called branch decompositions) also holds if submodularity is replaced by a different property that we call maximum-submodular.
We then define a natural, though somewhat unusual connectivity function on finite data sets in an arbitrary metric space and prove that its tangles are in one-to-one correspondence with the clusters obtained by applying the well-known single linkage clustering algorithms to the same data set.
The idea of viewing tangles as clusters has first been proposed by Diestel and Whittle [Reinhard Diestel et al., 2019] as an approach to image segmentation. To the best of our knowledge, our result is the first that establishes a precise technical connection between tangles and clusters
The Weisfeiler-Leman Dimension of Planar Graphs is at most 3
We prove that the Weisfeiler-Leman (WL) dimension of the class of all finite
planar graphs is at most 3. In particular, every finite planar graph is
definable in first-order logic with counting using at most 4 variables. The
previously best known upper bounds for the dimension and number of variables
were 14 and 15, respectively.
First we show that, for dimension 3 and higher, the WL-algorithm correctly
tests isomorphism of graphs in a minor-closed class whenever it determines the
orbits of the automorphism group of any arc-colored 3-connected graph belonging
to this class.
Then we prove that, apart from several exceptional graphs (which have
WL-dimension at most 2), the individualization of two correctly chosen vertices
of a colored 3-connected planar graph followed by the 1-dimensional
WL-algorithm produces the discrete vertex partition. This implies that the
3-dimensional WL-algorithm determines the orbits of a colored 3-connected
planar graph.
As a byproduct of the proof, we get a classification of the 3-connected
planar graphs with fixing number 3.Comment: 34 pages, 3 figures, extended version of LICS 2017 pape
Approximating branchwidth on parametric extensions of planarity
The \textsl{branchwidth} of a graph has been introduced by Roberson and
Seymour as a measure of the tree-decomposability of a graph, alternative to
treewidth. Branchwidth is polynomially computable on planar graphs by the
celebrated ``Ratcatcher''-algorithm of Seymour and Thomas. We investigate an
extension of this algorithm to minor-closed graph classes, further than planar
graphs as follows: Let be a graph embeddedable in the projective plane
and be a graph embeddedable in the torus. We prove that every
-minor free graph contains a subgraph where the
difference between the branchwidth of and the branchwidth of is
bounded by some constant, depending only on and . Moreover, the
graph admits a tree decomposition where all torsos are planar. This
decomposition can be used for deriving an EPTAS for branchwidth: For
-minor free graphs, there is a function
and a -approximation algorithm
for branchwidth, running in time for every