An edge cover of a graph is a set of edges such that every vertex has at
least an adjacent edge in it. Previously, approximation algorithm for counting
edge covers is only known for 3 regular graphs and it is randomized. We design
a very simple deterministic fully polynomial-time approximation scheme (FPTAS)
for counting the number of edge covers for any graph. Our main technique is
correlation decay, which is a powerful tool to design FPTAS for counting
problems. In order to get FPTAS for general graphs without degree bound, we
make use of a stronger notion called computationally efficient correlation
decay, which is introduced in [Li, Lu, Yin SODA 2012].Comment: To appear in SODA 201
