Structure in sparse k-critical graphs

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

A graph is a mathematical structure consisting of a set of objects, which we call vertices, and links between pairs of objects, which we call edges. Graphs are used to model many problems arising in areas such as physics, sociology, and computer science. It is partially because of the simplicity of the definition of a graph that the concept can be so widely used. Nevertheless, when applied to a particular task, it is not always necessary to study graphs in all their generality, and it can be convenient to studying them from a restricted point of view. Restriction can come from requiring graphs to be embeddable in a particular surface, to admit certain types of decompositions, or by forbidding some substructure. A collection of graphs satisfying a fixed restriction forms a class of graphs. Many important classes of graphs satisfy that graphs belonging to it cannot have many edges in comparison with the number of vertices. Such is the case of classes with an upper bound on the maximum degree, and of classes excluding a fixed minor. Recently, the notion of classes with bounded expansion was introduced by Neˇsetˇril and Ossona de Mendez [62], as a generalisation of many important types of sparse classes. In this thesis we study chromatic and structural properties of classes with bounded expansion. We say a graph is k-degenerate if each of its subgraphs has a vertex of degree at most k. The degeneracy is thus a measure of the density of a graph. This notion has been generalised with the introduction, by Kierstead and Yang [47], of the generalised colouring numbers. These parameters have found applications in many areas of Graph Theory, including a characterisation of classes with bounded expansion. One of the main results of this thesis is a series of upper bounds on the generalised colouring numbers, for different sparse classes of graphs, such as classes excluding a fixed complete minor, classes with bounded genus and classes with bounded tree-width. We also study the following problem: for a fixed positive integer p, how many colours do we need to colour a given graph in such a way that vertices at distance exactly p get different colours? When considering classes with bounded expansion, we improve dramatically on the previously known upper bounds for the number of colours needed. Finally, we introduce a notion of addition of graph classes, and show various cases in which sparse classes can be summed so as to obtain another sparse class.

FPT algorithms for domination in sparse graphs and beyond

We formulate the relationship of quasi-Laplacian energy of some novel classes of graphs with their corresponding original graphs. The novel graphs in our discussion are the -graph, -graph, -graph, total graph, and their join and corona operations graphs. The whole formulation is based on the relationship between quasi-Laplacian energy and the vertex degrees of the novel graph. It is also noted that quasi-Laplacian energy is closely related with the first Zagreb index, number of vertices and edges of the graph. The exact formulas of quasi-Laplacian energy of novel graphs are obtained in terms of the corresponding quasi-Laplacian energies, the first Zagreb indices, and the number of vertices and edges of the original graphs.

Listing, generating or enumerating objects of specified type is one of the principal tasks in algorithmics. In graph algorithms one often enumerates vertex subsets satisfying a certain property. We study the enumeration of all minimal connected dominating sets of an input graph from various graph classes of bounded chordality. We establish enumeration algorithms as well as lower and upper bounds for the maximum number of minimal connected dominating sets in such graphs. In particular, we present algorithms to enumerate all minimal connected dominating sets of chordal graphs in time O(1.7159^n), of split graphs in time O(1.3803^n), and of AT-free, strongly chordal, and distance-hereditary graphs in time O^*(3^{n/3}), where n is the number of vertices of the input graph. Our algorithms imply corresponding upper bounds for the number of minimal connected dominating sets for these graph classes.

We overview algorithmic results for classes of sparse graphs emphasizing new developments in this area. We focus on recently introduced classes of graphs with bounded expansion and nowhere-dense graphs and relate algorithmic meta-theorems for these classes of graphs to their analogues for proper minor-closed classes of graphs, classes of graphs with bounded tree-width, locally bounded tree-width and locally excluding a minor.

ABSTRACTAn independent set of size in a finite undirected graph is a set of vertices of the graph, no two of which are connected by an edge. Let be the number of independent sets of size in the graph and let . In 1987, Alavi, Malde, Schwenk, and Erdős asked if the independent set sequence of a tree is unimodal (the sequence goes up and then down). This problem is still open. In 2006, Levit and Mandrescu showed that the last third of the independent set sequence of a tree is decreasing. We show that the first 46.8% of the independent set sequence of a random tree is increasing with (exponentially) high probability as the number of vertices goes to infinity. So, the question of Alavi, Malde, Schwenk, and Erdős is “four‐fifths true,” with high probability. We also show unimodality of the independent set sequence of Erdős–Rényi random graphs, when the expected degree of a single vertex is large (with [exponentially] high probability as the number of vertices in the graph goes to infinity, except for a small region near the mode). A weaker result is shown for random regular graphs. The structure of independent sets of size as varies is of interest in probability, statistical physics, combinatorics, and computer science.

In recent years, a variety of randomized constructions of sketching matrices have been devised, that have been used in fast algorithms for numerical linear algebra problems, such as least squares regression, low-rank approximation, and the approximation of leverage scores. A key property of sketching matrices is that of subspace embedding. In this paper, we study sketching matrices that are obtained from bipartite graphs that are sparse, i.e., have left degree s that is small. In particular, we explore two popular classes of sparse graphs, namely, expander graphs and magical graphs. For a given subspace ${\mathcal{U}} \subseteq {{\mathbb{R}}^n}$ of dimension k, we show that the magical graph with left degree s = 2 yields a (1 ± ϵ) ℓ <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</inf> -subspace embedding for ${\mathcal{U}}$, if the number of right vertices (the sketch size) $m = {\mathcal{O}}\left( {{k^2}/{\varepsilon ^2}} \right)$. The expander graph with $s = {\mathcal{O}}(\log k/\varepsilon )$ yields a subspace embedding for $m = {\mathcal{O}}\left( {k\log k/{\varepsilon ^2}} \right)$. We also discuss the construction of sparse sketching matrices with reduced randomness using expanders based on error-correcting codes. Empirical results on various synthetic and real datasets show that these sparse graph sketching matrices work very well in practice.

We improve the best previously-known lower bound on the size of largest homometric sets in sparse diameter-two graphs. Along with the proof, we provide a method for constructing the desired homometric sets. We also study outerplanar graphs and show how to construct homometric sets in a given outerplanar graph of the size at least clogn, where n is the number of vertices in the graph, and c a positive fixed constant.

In this thesis we study the number of spanning trees in some classes of graphs. This is made possible by the famous matrix tree theorem established by Kirchhoff in 1847 which states that the number of spanning trees in a finite graph is given by the product of the non-zero eigenvalues of the combinatorial Laplacian of the graph divided by the number of vertices. We adapt techniques derived by Chinta, Jorgenson and Karlsson in 2010 for d-dimensional discrete tori to circulant graphs with first generator equals to 1 and to d-dimensional degenerating discrete tori. They are degenerating in the sense that d-p sides of the tori are tending to infinity at the same rate while the p other sides tend to infinity sublinearly with respect to the d-p sides. Furthermore, the results on d-dimensional discrete tori enable to derive asymptotics for the number of spanning trees on d-dimensional orthotope square lattices. Other results obtained in this thesis concern closed formulas for the number of spanning trees in directed and non-directed circulant graphs where the generators vary, that is, they linearly depend on the number of vertices.

In the past decades for more and more graph classes the Graph Isomorphism Problem was shown to be solvable in polynomial time. An interesting family of graph classes arises from intersection graphs of geometric objects. In this work we show that the Graph Isomorphism Problem for unit square graphs, intersection graphs of axis-parallel unit squares in the plane, can be solved in polynomial time. Since the recognition problem for this class of graphs is NP-hard we can not rely on standard techniques for geometric graphs based on constructing a canonical realization. Instead, we develop new techniques which combine structural insights into the class of unit square graphs with understanding of the automorphism group of such graphs. For the latter we introduce a generalization of bounded degree graphs which is used to capture the main structure of unit square graphs. Using group theoretic algorithms we obtain sufficient information to solve the isomorphism problem for unit square graphs.

For any class C of bipartite graphs, we define quasi-C to be the class of all graphs G such that every bipartition of G belongs to C. This definition is motivated by a generalisation of the switch Markov chain on perfect matchings from bipartite graphs to nonbipartite graphs. The monotone graphs, also known as bipartite permutation graphs and proper interval bigraphs, are such a class of bipartite graphs. We investigate the structure of quasi-monotone graphs and hence construct a polynomial time recognition algorithm for graphs in this class.

We describe algorithms, based on Avis and Fukuda's reverse search paradigm, for listing all maximal independent sets in a sparse graph in polynomial time and delay per output. For bounded degree graphs, our algorithms take constant time per set generated; for minor-closed graph families, the time is O ( n ) per set, and for more general sparse graph families we achieve subquadratic time per set. We also describe new data structures for maintaining a dynamic vertex set S in a sparse or minor-closed graph family, and querying the number of vertices not dominated by S ; for minor-closed graph families the time per update is constant, while it is sublinear for any sparse graph family. We can also maintain a dynamic vertex set in an arbitrary m -edge graph and test the independence of the maintained set in time O (√m) per update. We use the domination data structures as part of our enumeration algorithms.

At present, the graph neural network has achieved good results in the semisupervised classification of graph structure data. However, the classification effect is greatly limited in those data without graph structure, incomplete graph structure, or noise. It has no high prediction accuracy and cannot solve the problem of the missing graph structure. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a high-order graph learning attention neural network (HGLAT) for semisupervised classification. First, a graph learning module based on the improved variational graph autoencoder is proposed, which can learn and optimize graph structures for data sets without topological graph structure and data sets with missing topological structure and perform regular constraints on the generated graph structure to make the optimized graph structure more reasonable. Then, in view of the shortcomings of graph attention neural network (GAT) that cannot make full use of the graph high-order topology structure for node classification and graph structure learning, we propose a graph classification module that extends the attention mechanism to high-order neighbors, in which attention decays according to the increase of neighbor order. HGLAT performs joint optimization on the two modules of graph learning and graph classification and performs semisupervised node classification while optimizing the graph structure, which improves the classification performance. On 5 real data sets, by comparing 8 classification methods, the experiment shows that HGLAT has achieved good classification results on both a data set with graph structure and a data set without graph structure.

Suppose that we have (i) a graph with an unknown edge set and (ii) access to an oracle that returns all neighbors of a probed vertex. We want to find the hubs, that is, vertices with degree above a given threshold. An almost obvious two-stage randomized strategy is to query randomly sampled vertices and then their neighbors. We prove that this strategy achieves, in certain classes of sparse graphs, an asymptotically optimal query number among all possible querying strategies, including adaptive strategies. A detail of importance for an optimal constant factor is the number of probes in the neighborhood of a hub candidate. We show that 2 is in general the best choice in the graphs of interest. In a similar way we analyze, in the same model, the problem of finding small, almost dominating sets. The problems and graph classes are motivated mainly by the elucidation of interaction networks in molecular biology. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. NETWORKS, Vol. 57(4), 344-350 2011 © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.