Star forests, dominating sets and Ramsey-type problems

On Secure Domination in Graphs

On the ascending subgraph decomposition problem for bipartite graphs

Finding Paths between graph colourings: PSPACE-completeness and superpolynomial distances

For a class C of graphs, #Sub(C) is the counting problem that, given a graph H from C and an arbitrary graph G, asks for the number of subgraphs of G isomorphic to H. It is known that if C has bounded vertex-cover number (equivalently, the size of the maximum matching in C is bounded), then #Sub(C) is polynomial-time solvable. We complement this result with a corresponding lower bound: if C is any recursively enumerable class of graphs with unbounded vertex-cover number, then #Sub(C) is #W[1]-hard parameterized by the size of H and hence not polynomial-time solvable and not even fixed-parameter tractable, unless FPT is equal to #W[1]. As a first step of the proof, we show that counting k-matchings in bipartite graphs is #W[1]-hard. Recently, Curticapean [ICALP 2013] proved the #W[1]-hardness of counting k-matchings in general graphs, our result strengthens this statement to bipartite graphs with a considerably simpler proof and even shows that, assuming the Exponential Time Hypothesis (ETH), there is no f(k)*no(k/log(k)) time algorithm for counting k-matchings in bipartite graphs for any computable function f. As a consequence, we obtain an independent and somewhat simpler proof of the classical result of Flum and Grohe [SICOMP 2004] stating that counting paths of length k is #W[1]-hard, as well as a similar almost-tight ETH-based lower bound on the exponent.

A vertex coloring of a graph G is an assignment of colors to the vertices of G so that every two adjacent vertices of G have different colors. A coloring related property of a graphs is also an assignment of colors or labels to the vertices of a graph, in which the process of labeling is done according to an extra condition. A set S of vertices of a graph G is a dominating set in G if every vertex outside of S is adjacent to at least one vertex belonging to S. A domination parameter of G is related to those structures of a graph that satisfy some domination property together with other conditions on the vertices of G. In this article we study several mathematical properties related to coloring, domination and location of corona graphs. We investigate the distance-k colorings of corona graphs. Particularly, we obtain tight bounds for the distance-2 chromatic number and distance-3 chromatic number of corona graphs, through some relationships between the distance-k chromatic number of corona graphs and the distance-k chromatic number of its factors. Moreover, we give the exact value of the distance-k chromatic number of the corona of a path and an arbitrary graph. On the other hand, we obtain bounds for the Roman dominating number and the locating–domination number of corona graphs. We give closed formulaes for the k-domination number, the distance-k domination number, the independence domination number, the domatic number and the idomatic number of corona graphs.

Axiomatic characterization of the interval function of a bipartite graph

We resolve a number of long-standing open problems in online graph coloring. More specifically, we develop tight lower bounds on the performance of online algorithms for fundamental graph classes. An important contribution is that our bounds also hold for randomized online algorithms, for which hardly any results were known. Technically, we construct lower bounds for chordal graphs. The constructions then allow us to derive results on the performance of randomized online algorithms for the following further graph classes: trees, planar, bipartite, inductive, bounded-treewidth and disk graphs. It shows that the best competitive ratio of both deterministic and randomized online algorithms is Theta(log n), where n is the number of vertices of a graph. Furthermore, we prove that this guarantee cannot be improved if an online algorithm has a lookahead of size O(n/log n) or access to a reordering buffer of size n^(1-epsilon), for any 0 < epsilon <= 1. A consequence of our results is that, for all of the above mentioned graph classes except bipartite graphs, the natural First Fit coloring algorithm achieves an optimal performance, up to constant factors, among deterministic and randomized online algorithms.

There are several known results concerning how matroids can be induced from given matroids by a bipartite graph and the properties that are inherited in this way. The purpose of this note is to extend some of these results to the situation where the bipartite graph is replaced by an arbitrary directed graph. We show how a directed graph and a matroid can be used to induce a new matroid. If the initial matroid is strongly base orderable, we prove that the induced matroid is also. In particular, a matroid induced from a free matroid by a directed graph is strongly base orderable. A consequence is that the cycle matroid of the complete graph on four nodes cannot be induced from a free matroid by any directed graph.

Hamiltonian connectivity and globally 3∗-connectivity of dual-cube extensive networks

An upper bound of the nullity of a graph in terms of order and maximum degree

In our recent work, we proposed the design of perfect reconstruction orthogonal wavelet filterbanks, called graph- QMF, for arbitrary undirected weighted graphs. In that formulation we first designed "one-dimensional" two-channel filterbanks on bipartite graphs, and then extended them to "multi-dimensional" separable two-channel filterbanks for arbitrary graphs via a bipartite subgraph decomposition. We specifically designed wavelet filters based on the spectral decomposition of the graph, and stated necessary and sufficient conditions for a two-channel graph filter-bank on bipartite graphs to provide aliasing-cancellation, perfect reconstruction and orthogonal set of basis (orthogonality). While, the exact graph-QMF designs satisfy all the above conditions, they are not exactly k-hop localized on the graph. In this paper, we relax the condition of orthogonality to design a biorthogonal pair of graph-wavelets that can have compact spatial spread and still satisfy the perfect reconstruction conditions. The design is analogous to the standard Cohen-Daubechies-Feauveau's (CDF) construction of factorizing a maximally-flat Daubechies half-band filter. Preliminary results demonstrate that the proposed filterbanks can be useful for both standard signal processing applications as well as for signals defined on arbitrary graphs. Note: Code examples from this paper are available at http://biron.usc.edu/wiki/index.php/Graph Filterbanks

Roman [1,2]-domination of graphs

Tip decomposition has a pivotal role in mining cohesive subgraphs in bipartite graphs by computing the tip number of each vertex in accordance with the non-trivial motif butterfly ((2,2)-biclique). It has been a popular research topic with applications in document clustering, spam group detection, and analysis of affiliation networks. In such applications, the graphs are not only large, but they evolve quickly with new edges being continuously added/deleted. While existing centralized techniques could solve the tip decomposition problem for static bipartite graphs, they are not efficient for maintaining the tip numbers of vertices on large-scale graphs. In this paper, we study butterfly analysis problems on bipartite graphs in a distributed environment with the vertex-centric model. We first extend a centralized butterfly counting algorithm to a distributed version, called DBCA. An ingenious message aggregation strategy is designed to reduce massive redundant messaging and avoid the memory overflow problem while processing large-scale graphs. Based on the results of DBCA, we develop a distributed tip decomposition algorithm (DTDA) to get the tip number of each vertex in parallel. Finally, to maintain the tip numbers of vertices efficiently while graphs evolve over time, we explore a distributed tip maintenance algorithm (DTMA) along with a novel task-split strategy. Specifically, for an updated edge (insertion/deletion), several sub-tasks will be generated in line with the topology structure of the original bipartite graph. To our best knowledge, this is the first study to process the butterfly analysis problems in a distributed environment. In addition, comprehensive experiments have been conducted on real-world bipartite graphs. The experiment results demonstrate that our proposed algorithms are efficient and scalable.

Matching fields and lattice points of simplices

A bipartite graph G(X, Y) whose vertex set is partitioned into X and Y is a convex bipartite graph, if there is an ordering of $$X=(x_1,\ldots ,x_m)$$ such that for all $$y \in Y$$ , $$N_G(y)$$ is consecutive with respect to the ordering of X, and G is said to have convexity with respect to X. A k-star caterpillar is a tree with a collection of stars with each star having k vertices of degree one whose roots are joined by a path. For a bipartite graph with partitions X and Y, we associate a k-star caterpillar on X such that for each vertex in Y, its neighborhood induces a tree. The minimum Steiner tree problem (STREE) is defined as follows: given a connected graph $$G=(V,E)$$ and a subset of vertices $$R \subseteq V(G)$$ , the objective is to find a minimum cardinality set $$S \subseteq V(G)$$ such that the set $$R \cup S$$ induces a connected subgraph. In this paper, we present the following dichotomy result: we show that STREE is NP-complete for 1-star caterpillar convex bipartite graphs and polynomial-time solvable for 0-star caterpillar convex bipartite graphs (also known as convex bipartite graphs). We also strengthen the well-known result of Müller and Brandstädt (Theoret Comput Sci 53(2-3):257-265, 1987), which says STREE in chordal bipartite graphs is NP-complete (reduction instances are 3-star caterpillar convex bipartite graphs). As an application, we use our STREE results to solve: (i) the classical dominating set problem in convex bipartite graphs, (ii) STREE on interval graphs, linear time.