A rainbow matching in an edge-colored graph is a matching whose edges have distinct colors. We address the complexity issue of the following problem, \mrbm: Given an edge-colored graph $G$, how large is the largest rainbow matching in $G$? We present several sharp contrasts in the complexity of this problem.
We show, among others, that
* can be approximated by a polynomial algorithm with approximation ratio $2/3-\eps$.
* is APX-complete, even when restricted to properly edge-colored linear forests without a $5$-vertex path, and is solvable in %time $O(m^{3/2})$ on edge-colored $m$-edge polynomial time for edge-colored forests without a $4$-vertex path.
* is APX-complete, even when restricted to properly edge-colored trees without an $8$-vertex path, and is solvable in %time $O(n^{7/2})$ on edge-colored $n$-vertex polynomial time for edge-colored trees without a $7$-vertex path.
* is APX-complete, even when restricted to properly edge-colored paths.
These results provide a dichotomy theorem for the complexity of the problem on forests and trees in terms of forbidding paths. The latter is somewhat surprising, since, to the best of our knowledge, no (unweighted) graph problem prior to our result is known to be NP-hard for simple paths.
We also address the parameterized complexity of the problem.
In this paper, we prove a conjecture of Aharoni and Howard on the existence of rainbow (transversal) matchings in sufficiently large families $\mathcal F_1,\ldots, \mathcal F_s$ of tuples in $\{1,\ldots, n\}^k$, provided $s\ge 470.$
Given an edge-colored complete graph $K_n$ on $n$ vertices, a perfect (respectively, near-perfect) matching $M$ in $K_n$ with an even (respectively, odd) number of vertices is rainbow if all edges have distinct colors. In this paper, we consider an edge coloring of $K_n$ by circular distance, and we denote the resulting complete graph by $K^{\bullet}_n$. We show that when $K^{\bullet}_n$ has an even number of vertices, it contains a rainbow perfect matching if and only if $n=8k$ or $n=8k+2$, where $k$ is a nonnegative integer. In the case of an odd number of vertices, Kirkman matching is known…
A perfect matching M in an edge-colored complete bipartite graph K_{n,n} is rainbow if no pair of edges in M have the same color. We obtain asymptotic enumeration results for the number of rainbow matchings in terms of the maximum number of occurrences of a color. We also consider two natural models of random edge-colored K_{n,n} and show that, if the number of colors is at least n, then there is with high probability a random matching. This in particular shows that almost every square matrix of order n in which every entry appears at most n times has a Latin transversal.
Aharoni and Berger conjectured that in any bipartite multigraph that is properly edge-coloured by $n$ colours with at least $n + 1$ edges of each colour there must be a matching that uses each colour exactly once. In this paper we consider the same question without the bipartiteness assumption. We show that in any multigraph with edge multiplicities $o(n)$ that is properly edge-coloured by $n$ colours with at least $n + o(n)$ edges of each colour there must be a matching of size $n-O(1)$ that uses each colour at most once.
A vertex-colored graph is {\it rainbow vertex-connected} if any two vertices are connected by a path whose internal vertices have distinct colors, which was introduced by Krivelevich and Yuster. The {\it rainbow vertex-connection} of a connected graph $G$, denoted by $rvc(G)$, is the smallest number of colors that are needed in order to make $G$ rainbow vertex-connected. In this paper, we study the computational complexity of vertex-rainbow connection of graphs and prove that computing $rvc(G)$ is NP-Hard. Moreover, we show that it is already NP-Complete to decide whether $rvc(G)=2$. We also p…
An edge-colored graph $G$ is said to be rainbow connected if between each pair of vertices there exists a path which uses each color at most once. The rainbow connection number, denoted by $rc(G)$, is the minimum number of colors needed to make $G$ rainbow connected. Along with its variants, which consider vertex colorings and/or so-called strong colorings, the rainbow connection number has been studied from both the algorithmic and graph-theoretic points of view. In this paper we present a range of new results on the computational complexity of computing the four major variants of the rainbow…
One of the most important questions in matroid optimization is to find disjoint common bases of two matroids. The significance of the problem is well-illustrated by the long list of conjectures that can be formulated as special cases. Bérczi and Schwarcz showed that the problem is hard in general, therefore identifying the borderline between tractable and intractable instances is of interest. In the present paper, we study the special case when one of the matroids is a partition matroid while the other one is a graphic matroid. This setting is equivalent to the problem of packing rainbow spann…
Let $G$ be a finite simple graph with vertex set $V(G)$ and edge set $E(G)$. A function $f : V(G) \rightarrow \mathcal{P}(\{1, 2, \dotsc, k\})$ is a \textit{$k$-rainbow dominating function} on $G$ if for each vertex $v \in V(G)$ for which $f(v)= \emptyset$, it holds that $\bigcup_{u \in N(v)}f(u) = \{1, 2, \dotsc, k\}$. The weight of a $k$-rainbow dominating function is the value $\sum_{v \in V(G)}|f(v)|$. The \textit{$k$-rainbow domination number} $γ_{rk}(G)$ is the minimum weight of a $k$-rainbow dominating function on $G$. In this paper, we initiate the study of $k$-rainbow domination numbe…
The Rainbow k-Coloring problem asks whether the edges of a given graph can be colored in $k$ colors so that every pair of vertices is connected by a rainbow path, i.e., a path with all edges of different colors. Our main result states that for any $k\ge 2$, there is no algorithm for Rainbow k-Coloring running in time $2^{o(n^{3/2})}$, unless ETH fails. Motivated by this negative result we consider two parameterized variants of the problem. In Subset Rainbow k-Coloring problem, introduced by Chakraborty et al. [STACS 2009, J. Comb. Opt. 2009], we are additionally given a set $S$ of pairs of ver…
A path in an edge-colored graph is \textit{rainbow} if no two edges of it are colored the same. The graph is said to be \textit{rainbow connected} if there is a rainbow path between every pair of vertices. If there is a rainbow shortest path between every pair of vertices, the graph is \textit{strong rainbow connected}. We consider the complexity of the problem of deciding if a given edge-colored graph is rainbow or strong rainbow connected. These problems are called \textsc{Rainbow connectivity} and \textsc{Strong rainbow connectivity}, respectively. We prove both problems remain $\NP$\hyp{}c…
We consider the problem of computing the strong rainbow connection number $src(G)$ for cactus graphs $G$ in which all cycles have odd length. We present a formula to calculate $src(G)$ for such odd cacti which can be evaluated in linear time, as well as an algorithm for computing the corresponding optimal strong rainbow edge coloring, with polynomial worst case run time complexity. Although computing $src(G)$ is NP-hard in general, previous work has demonstrated that it may be computed in polynomial time for certain classes of graphs, including cycles, trees and block clique graphs. This work …
A rainbow matching for (not necessarily distinct) sets F_1,...,F_k of hypergraph edges is a matching consisting of k edges, one from each F_i. The aim of the paper is twofold - to put order in the multitude of conjectures that relate to this concept (some of them first presented here), and to present some partial results on one of these conjectures, that seems central among them.
A rainbow path in an edge coloured graph is a path in which no two edges are coloured the same. A rainbow colouring of a connected graph G is a colouring of the edges of G such that every pair of vertices in G is connected by at least one rainbow path. The minimum number of colours required to rainbow colour G is called its rainbow connection number. Between them, Chakraborty et al. [J. Comb. Optim., 2011] and Ananth et al. [FSTTCS, 2012] have shown that for every integer k, k \geq 2, it is NP-complete to decide whether a given graph can be rainbow coloured using k colours. A split graph is a …
This note presents several results in graph theory inspired by the author's work in the proof theory of linear logic; these results are purely combinatorial and do not involve logic. We show that trails avoiding forbidden transitions, properly arc-colored directed trails and rainbow paths for complete multipartite color classes can be found in linear time, whereas finding rainbow paths is NP-complete for any other restriction on color classes. For the tractable cases, we also state new structural properties equivalent to Kotzig's theorem on the existence of bridges in unique perfect matchings.…
In this paper we investigate the structure of flip graphs on non-crossing perfect matchings in the plane. Specifically, consider all non-crossing straight-line perfect matchings on a set of $2n$ points that are placed equidistantly on the unit circle. A flip operation on such a matching replaces two matching edges that span an empty quadrilateral with the other two edges of the quadrilateral, and the flip is called centered if the quadrilateral contains the center of the unit circle. The graph $\mathcal{G}_n$ has those matchings as vertices, and an edge between any two matchings that differ in…
We consider the following question: given an $(X,Y)$-bigraph $G$ and a set $S \subset X$, does $G$ contain two disjoint matchings $M_1$ and $M_2$ such that $M_1$ saturates $X$ and $M_2$ saturates $S$? When $|S|\geq |X|-1$, this question is solvable by finding an appropriate factor of the graph. In contrast, we show that when $S$ is allowed to be an arbitrary subset of $X$, the problem is NP-hard.
For bipartite graphs the NP-completeness is proved for the problem of existence of maximum matching which removal leads to a graph with given lower(upper)bound for the cardinality of its maximum matching.
A popular method in combinatorial optimization is to express polytopes P, which may potentially have exponentially many facets, as solutions of linear programs that use few extra variables to reduce the number of constraints down to a polynomial. After two decades of standstill, recent years have brought amazing progress in showing lower bounds for the so called extension complexity, which for a polytope P denotes the smallest number of inequalities necessary to describe a higher dimensional polytope Q that can be linearly projected on P. However, the central question in this field remained wi…
Let $G$ be a graph and suppose we are given, for each $v \in V(G)$, a strict ordering of the neighbors of $v$. A set of matchings ${\cal M}$ of $G$ is called internally stable if there are no matchings $M,M' \in {\cal M}$ such that an edge of $M$ blocks $M'$. The sets of stable (à la Gale and Shapley) matchings and of von Neumann-Morgenstern stable matchings are examples of internally stable sets of matching. In this paper, we study, in both the marriage and the roommate case, inclusionwise maximal internally stable sets of matchings. We call those sets internally closed. By building on known …
For a connected graph $G=(V,E)$, a matching $M\subseteq E$ is a matching cut of $G$ if $G-M$ is disconnected. It is known that for an integer $d$, the corresponding decision problem Matching Cut is polynomial-time solvable for graphs of diameter at most $d$ if $d\leq 2$ and NP-complete if $d\geq 3$. We prove the same dichotomy for graphs of bounded radius. For a graph $H$, a graph is $H$-free if it does not contain $H$ as an induced subgraph. As a consequence of our result, we can solve Matching Cut in polynomial time for $P_6$-free graphs, extending a recent result of Feghali for $P_5$-free g…
The NP-complete problem Matching Cut is to decide if a graph has a matching that is also an edge cut of the graph. We prove new complexity results for Matching Cut restricted to $H$-free graphs, that is, graphs that do not contain some fixed graph $H$ as an induced subgraph. We also prove new complexity results for two recently studied variants of Matching Cut, on $H$-free graphs. The first variant requires that the matching cut must be extendable to a perfect matching of the graph. The second variant requires the matching cut to be a perfect matching. In particular, we prove that there exists…
Given a graph with edges colored red or blue and an integer $k$, the exact perfect matching problem asks if there exists a perfect matching with exactly $k$ red edges. There exists a randomized polylogarithmic-time parallel algorithm to solve this problem, dating back to the eighties, but no deterministic polynomial-time algorithm is known, even for bipartite graphs. In this paper we show that there is no sub-exponential sized linear program that can describe the convex hull of exact matchings in bipartite graphs. In fact, we prove something stronger, that there is no sub-exponential sized lin…
We investigate the complexity of approximately counting stable matchings in the $k$-attribute model, where the preference lists are determined by dot products of "preference vectors" with "attribute vectors", or by Euclidean distances between "preference points" and "attribute points". Irving and Leather proved that counting the number of stable matchings in the general case is $#P$-complete. Counting the number of stable matchings is reducible to counting the number of downsets in a (related) partial order and is interreducible, in an approximation-preserving sense, to a class of problems tha…
In a graph, a matching cut is an edge cut that is a matching. Matching Cut is the problem of deciding whether or not a given graph has a matching cut, which is known to be NP-complete even when restricted to bipartite graphs. It has been proved that Matching Cut is polynomially solvable for graphs of diameter two. In this paper, we show that, for any fixed integer $d\ge 3$, Matching Cut is NP-complete in the class of graphs of diameter $d$. This resolves an open problem posed by Borowiecki and Jesse-Józefczyk in [Matching cutsets in graphs of diameter $2$, Theoretical Computer Science 407 (200…
The Induced Graph Matching problem asks to find k disjoint induced subgraphs isomorphic to a given graph H in a given graph G such that there are no edges between vertices of different subgraphs. This problem generalizes the classical Independent Set and Induced Matching problems, among several other problems. We show that Induced Graph Matching is fixed-parameter tractable in k on claw-free graphs when H is a fixed connected graph, and even admits a polynomial kernel when H is a complete graph. Both results rely on a new, strong, and generic algorithmic structure theorem for claw-free graphs.…
