We prove that the tree-width of graphs in a hereditary class defined by a finite set $F$ of forbidden induced subgraphs is bounded if and only if $F$ includes a complete graph, a complete bipartite graph, a tripod (a forest in which every connected component has at most 3 leaves) and the line graph of a tripod.
We resolve the computational complexity of Graph Isomorphism for classes of graphs characterized by two forbidden induced subgraphs $H_1$ and $H_2$ for all but six pairs $(H_1,H_2)$. Schweitzer had previously shown that the number of open cases was finite, but without specifying the open cases. Grohe and Schweitzer proved that Graph Isomorphism is polynomial-time solvable on graph classes of bounded clique-width. Our work combines known results such as these with new results. By exploiting a relationship between Graph Isomorphism and clique-width, we simultaneously reduce the number of open ca…
We introduce tree dimension and its leveled variant in order to measure the complexity of leaf sets in binary trees. We then provide a tight upper bound on the size of such sets using leveled tree dimension. This, in turn, implies both the famous Sauer-Shelah Lemma for VC dimension and Bhaskar's version for Littlestone dimension, giving clearer insight into why these results place the exact same upper bound on their respective shatter functions. We also classify the isomorphism types of maximal leaf sets by tree dimension. Finally, we generalize this analysis to higher-arity trees.
The class of $k$-star caterpillar convex bipartite graphs generalizes the class of convex bipartite graphs. 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 $k$-star caterpillar on $X$ is imaginary and if the imaginary structure is a path ($0$-star caterpillar), then it is the class of convex bipartite graphs. 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 mi…
First-Fit is a greedy algorithm for partitioning the elements of a poset into chains. Let $\textrm{FF}(w,Q)$ be the maximum number of chains that First-Fit uses on a $Q$-free poset of width $w$. A result due to Bosek, Krawczyk, and Matecki states that $\textrm{FF}(w,Q)$ is finite when $Q$ has width at most $2$. We describe a family of posets $\mathcal{Q}$ and show that the following dichotomy holds: if $Q\in\mathcal{Q}$, then $\textrm{FF}(w,Q) \le 2^{c(\log w)^2}$ for some constant $c$ depending only on $Q$, and if $Q\not\in\mathcal{Q}$, then $\textrm{FF}(w,Q) \ge 2^w - 1$.
We consider a dichotomy for analytic families of trees stating that either there is a colouring of the nodes for which all but finitely many levels of every tree are nonhomogeneous, or else the family contains an uncountable antichain. This dichotomy implies that every nontrivial Souslin poset satisfying the countable chain condition adds a splitting real. We then reduce the dichotomy to a conjecture of Sperner Theory. This conjecture is concerning the asymptotic behaviour of the product of the sizes of the m-shades of pairs of cross-t-intersecting families.
The connected tree-width of a graph is the minimum width of a tree-decomposition whose parts induce connected subgraphs. Long cycles are examples of graphs that have small tree-width but large connected tree-width. We show that a graph has small connected tree-width if and only if it has small tree-width and contains no long geodesic cycle. We further prove a connected analogue of the duality theorem for tree-width: a finite graph has small connected tree-width if and only if it has no bramble whose connected covers are all large. Both these results are qualitative: the bounds are good but not…
For a fixed digraph $\mathbb H$, the $\mathbb H$-coloring problem is the problem of deciding whether a given input digraph $\mathbb G$ admits a homomorphism to $\mathbb H$. The CSP dichotomy conjecture of Feder and Vardi is equivalent to proving that, for any $\mathbb H$, the $\mathbb H$-coloring problem is in in P or NP-complete. We confirm this dichotomy for a certain class of oriented trees, which we call special trees (generalizing earlier results on special triads and polyads). Moreover, we prove that every tractable special oriented tree has bounded width, i.e., the corresponding $\mathb…
Diestel and Müller showed that the connected tree-width of a graph $G$, i.e., the minimum width of any tree-decomposition with connected parts, can be bounded in terms of the tree-width of $G$ and the largest length of a geodesic cycle in $G$. We improve their bound to one that is of correct order of magnitude. Finally, we construct a graph whose connected tree-width exceeds the connected order of any of its brambles. This disproves a conjecture by Diestel and Müller asserting an analogue of tree-width duality.
This is an elementary presentation of the arithmetic of trees. We show how it is related to the Tamari poset. In the last part we investigate various ways of realizing this poset as a polytope (associahedron), including one inferred from Tamari's thesis.
We prove that every graph of rank-width $k$ is a pivot-minor of a graph of tree-width at most $2k$. We also prove that graphs of rank-width at most 1, equivalently distance-hereditary graphs, are exactly vertex-minors of trees, and graphs of linear rank-width at most 1 are precisely vertex-minors of paths. In addition, we show that bipartite graphs of rank-width at most 1 are exactly pivot-minors of trees and bipartite graphs of linear rank-width at most 1 are precisely pivot-minors of paths.
Over the last 30 years, researchers have investigated connections between dimension for posets and planarity for graphs. Here we extend this line of research to the structural graph theory parameter tree-width by proving that the dimension of a finite poset is bounded in terms of its height and the tree-width of its cover graph.
We consider the classical problems (Edge) Steiner Tree and Vertex Steiner Tree after restricting the input to some class of graphs characterized by a small set of forbidden induced subgraphs. We show a dichotomy for the former problem restricted to $(H_1,H_2)$-free graphs and a dichotomy for the latter problem restricted to $H$-free graphs. We find that there exists an infinite family of graphs $H$ such that Vertex Steiner Tree is polynomial-time solvable for $H$-free graphs, whereas there exist only two graphs $H$ for which this holds for Edge Steiner Tree. We also find that Edge Steiner Tree…
In 1990, Thomas proved that every graph admits a tree decomposition of minimum width that additionally satisfies a certain vertex-connectivity condition called leanness [A Menger-like property of tree-width: The finite case. Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B, 48(1):67-76, 1990]. This result had many uses and has been extended to several other decompositions. In this paper, we consider tree-cut decompositions, that have been introduced by Wollan as a possible edge-version of tree decompositions [The structure of graphs not admitting a fixed immersion. Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Se…
We prove that every sufficiently big 6-connected graph of bounded tree-width either has a K_6 minor, or has a vertex whose deletion makes the graph planar. This is a step toward proving that the same conclusion holds for all sufficiently big 6-connected graphs. Jorgensen conjectured that it holds for all 6-connected graphs.
For their famous algorithm for the disjoint paths problem, Robertson and Seymour proved that there is a function $f$ such that if the tree-width of a graph $G$ with $k$ pairs of terminals is at least $f(k)$, then $G$ contains a solution-irrelevant vertex (Graph Minors. XXII., JCTB 2012). We give a single-exponential lower bound on $f$. This bound even holds for planar graphs.
Minimum $k$-Section denotes the NP-hard problem to partition the vertex set of a graph into $k$ sets of sizes as equal as possible while minimizing the cut width, which is the number of edges between these sets. When $k$ is an input parameter and $n$ denotes the number of vertices, it is NP-hard to approximate the width of a minimum $k$-section within a factor of $n^c$ for any $c<1$, even when restricted to trees with constant diameter. Here, we show that every tree $T$ allows a $k$-section of width at most $(k-1) (2 + 16n / diam(T) ) Δ(T)$. This implies a polynomial-time constant-factor appro…
Tree-width and its linear variant path-width play a central role for the graph minor relation. In particular, Robertson and Seymour (1983) proved that for every tree~$T$, the class of graphs that do not contain $T$ as a minor has bounded path-width. For the pivot-minor relation, rank-width and linear rank-width take over the role from tree-width and path-width. As such, it is natural to examine if for every tree~$T$, the class of graphs that do not contain $T$ as a pivot-minor has bounded linear rank-width. We first prove that this statement is false whenever $T$ is a tree that is not a caterp…
The CSP dichotomy conjecture has been recently established, but a number of other dichotomy questions remain open, including the dichotomy classification of list homomorphism problems for signed graphs. Signed graphs arise naturally in many contexts, including for instance nowhere-zero flows for graphs embedded in non-orientable surfaces. For a fixed signed graph $\widehat{H}$, the list homomorphism problem asks whether an input signed graph $\widehat{G}$ with lists $L(v) \subseteq V(\widehat{H}), v \in V(\widehat{G}),$ admits a homomorphism $f$ to $\widehat{H}$ with all $f(v) \in L(v), v \in …
In this paper we consider the directed path-width and directed tree-width of recursively defined digraphs. As an important combinatorial tool, we show how the directed path-width and the directed tree-width can be computed for the disjoint union, order composition, directed union, and series composition of two directed graphs. These results imply the equality of directed path-width and directed tree-width for all digraphs which can be defined by these four operations. This allows us to show a linear-time solution for computing the directed path-width and directed tree-width of all these digrap…
Tree-cut width is a graph parameter introduced by Wollan that is an analogue of treewidth for the immersion order on graphs in the following sense: the tree-cut width of a graph is functionally equivalent to the largest size of a wall that can be found in it as an immersion. In this work we propose a variant of the definition of tree-cut width that is functionally equivalent to the original one, but for which we can state and prove a tight duality theorem relating it to naturally defined dual objects: appropriately defined brambles and tangles. Using this result we also propose a game characte…
We prove that if a graph has a tree-decomposition of width at most w, then it has a tree-decomposition of width at most w with certain desirable properties. We will use this result in a subsequent paper to show that every 2-connected graph of large path-width has a minor isomorphic to either a large tree with a vertex attached to every vertex of the tree or a large outerplanar graph.
The celebrated theorem of Robertson and Seymour states that in the family of minor-closed graph classes, there is a unique minimal class of graphs of unbounded tree-width, namely, the class of planar graphs. In the case of tree-width, the restriction to minor-closed classes is justified by the fact that the tree-width of a graph is never smaller than the tree-width of any of its minors. This, however, is not the case with respect to clique-width, as the clique-width of a graph can be (much) smaller than the clique-width of its minor. On the other hand, the clique-width of a graph is never smal…
We give a simple proof of the "tree-width duality theorem" of Seymour and Thomas that the tree-width of a finite graph is exactly one less than the largest order of its brambles.
We consider generalisations of tree width to directed graphs, that attracted much attention in the last fifteen years. About their relative strength with respect to "bounded width in one measure implies bounded width in the other" many problems remain unsolved. Only some results separating directed width measures are known. We give an almost complete picture of this relation. For this, we consider the cops and robber games characterising DAG-width and directed tree width (up to a constant factor). For DAG-width games, it is an open question whether the robber-monotonicity cost (the difference …
Partial 1-trees are undirected graphs of treewidth at most one. Similarly, partial 1-DAGs are directed graphs of KellyWidth at most two. It is well-known that an undirected graph is a partial 1-tree if and only if it has no K_3 minor. In this paper, we generalize this characterization to partial 1-DAGs. We show that partial 1-DAGs are characterized by three forbidden directed minors, K_3, N_4 and M_5.
Minimum Bisection denotes the NP-hard problem to partition the vertex set of a graph into two sets of equal sizes while minimizing the width of the bisection, which is defined as the number of edges between these two sets. We first consider this problem for trees and prove that the minimum bisection width of every tree $T$ on $n$ vertices satisfies $MinBis(T) \leq 8 n Δ(T) / diam(T)$. Second, we generalize this to arbitrary graphs with a given tree decomposition $(T,X)$ and give an upper bound on the minimum bisection width that depends on the structure of $(T,X)$. Moreover, we show that a bis…
Among other results, it is shown that 3-trees are $Δ$-edge-choosable and that graphs of tree-width 3 and maximum degree at least 7 are $Δ$-edge-choosable.
The tree-depth is a parameter introduced under several names as a measure of sparsity of a graph. We compute asymptotic values of the tree-depth of random graphs. For dense graphs, p>> 1/n, the tree-depth of a random graph G is a.a.s. td(G)=n-O(sqrt(n/p)). Random graphs with p=c/n, have a.a.s. linear tree-depth when c>1, the tree-depth is Theta (log n) when c=1 and Theta (loglog n) for c<1. The result for c>1 is derived from the computation of tree-width and provides a more direct proof of a conjecture by Gao on the linearity of tree-width recently proved by Lee, Lee and Oum. We also show that…
We prove that every triangle-free graph of tree-width t has chromatic number at most ceil((t + 3)/2), and demonstrate that this bound is tight. The argument also establishes a connection between coloring graphs of tree-width t and on-line coloring of graphs of path-width t.
A connected graph G is called matching covered if every edge of G is contained in a perfect matching. Perfect matching width is a width parameter for matching covered graphs based on a branch decomposition. It was introduced by Norine and intended as a tool for the structural study of matching covered graphs, especially in the context of Pfaffian orientations. Norine conjectured that graphs of high perfect matching width would contain a large grid as a matching minor, similar to the result on treewidth by Robertson and Seymour. In this paper we obtain the first results on perfect matching widt…
We study the effects of planarization (the construction of a planar diagram $D$ from a non-planar graph $G$ by replacing each crossing by a new vertex) on graph width parameters. We show that for treewidth, pathwidth, branchwidth, clique-width, and tree-depth there exists a family of $n$-vertex graphs with bounded parameter value, all of whose planarizations have parameter value $Ω(n)$. However, for bandwidth, cutwidth, and carving width, every graph with bounded parameter value has a planarization of linear size whose parameter value remains bounded. The same is true for the treewidth, pathwi…
We prove that, for all $\ell$ and $s$, every graph of sufficiently large tree-width contains either a complete bipartite graph $K_{s,s}$ or a chordless cycle of length greater than $\ell$.
The theory of sparse structures usually uses tree like structures as building blocks. In the context of sparse/dense dichotomy this role is played by graphs with bounded tree depth. In this paper we survey results related to this concept and particularly explain how these graphs are used to decompose and construct more complex graphs and structures. In more technical terms we survey some of the properties and applications of low tree depth decomposition of graphs.
We prove that for any fixed r>=2, the tree-width of graphs not containing K_r as a topological minor (resp. as a subgraph) is bounded by a linear (resp. polynomial) function of their rank-width. We also present refinements of our bounds for other graph classes such as K_r-minor free graphs and graphs of bounded genus.
We apply a recent duality theorem for tangles in abstract separation systems to derive tangle-type duality theorems for width-parameters in graphs and matroids. We further derive a duality theorem for the existence of clusters in large data sets. Our applications to graphs include new, tangle-type, duality theorems for tree-width, path-width, and tree-decompositions of small adhesion. Conversely, we show that carving width is dual to edge-tangles. For matroids we obtain a duality theorem for tree-width. Our results can be used to derive short proofs of all the classical duality theorems for wi…
A \emph{tree-partition} of a graph $G$ is a proper partition of its vertex set into `bags', such that identifying the vertices in each bag produces a forest. The \emph{tree-partition-width} of $G$ is the minimum number of vertices in a bag in a tree-partition of $G$. An anonymous referee of the paper by Ding and Oporowski [\emph{J. Graph Theory}, 1995] proved that every graph with tree-width $k\geq3$ and maximum degree $Δ\geq1$ has tree-partition-width at most $24kΔ$. We prove that this bound is within a constant factor of optimal. In particular, for all $k\geq3$ and for all sufficiently large…
We study the problem HomsTo$H$ of counting, modulo 2, the homomorphisms from an input graph to a fixed undirected graph $H$. A characteristic feature of modular counting is that cancellations make wider classes of instances tractable than is the case for exact (non-modular) counting, so subtle dichotomy theorems can arise. We show the following dichotomy: for any $H$ that contains no 4-cycles, HomsTo$H$ is either in polynomial time or is $\oplus P$-complete. This confirms a conjecture of Faben and Jerrum that was previously only known to hold for trees and for a restricted class of treewidth-2…
We study the parameterized complexity of the graph isomorphism problem when parameterized by width parameters related to tree decompositions. We apply the following technique to obtain fixed-parameter tractability for such parameters. We first compute an isomorphism invariant set of potential bags for a decomposition and then apply a restricted version of the Weisfeiler-Lehman algorithm to solve isomorphism. With this we show fixed-parameter tractability for several parameters and provide a unified explanation for various isomorphism results concerned with parameters related to tree decomposit…
We show that all sufficiently large (2k+3)-connected graphs of bounded tree-width are k-linked. Thomassen has conjectured that all sufficiently large (2k+2)-connected graphs are k-linked.
We develop some basic tools to work with representable matroids of bounded tree-width and use them to prove that, for any prime power $q$ and constant $k$, the characteristic polynomial of any loopless, $GF(q)$-representable matroid with tree-width $k$ has no real zero greater than $q^{k-1}$.
The local tree-width of a graph G=(V,E) is the function ltw^G: N -> N that associates with every natural number r the maximal tree-width of an r-neighborhood in G. Our main graph theoretic result is a decomposition theorem for graphs with excluded minors that essentially says that such graphs can be decomposed into trees of graphs of bounded local tree-width. As an application of this theorem, we show that a number of combinatorial optimization problems, such as Minimum Vertex Cover, Minimum Dominating Set, and Maximum Independent Set have a polynomial time approximation scheme when restricted…
We prove that for every $k$ and every $\varepsilon>0$, there exists $g$ such that every graph with tree-width at most $k$ and odd-girth at least $g$ has circular chromatic number at most $2+\varepsilon$.
Tree-width is an invaluable tool for computational problems on graphs. But often one would like to compute on other kinds of objects (e.g. decorated graphs or even algebraic structures) where there is no known tree-width analogue. Here we define an abstract analogue of tree-width which provides a uniform definition of various tree-width-like invariants including graph tree-width, hypergraph tree-width, complemented tree-width and even new constructions such as the tree-width of modular quotients. We obtain this generalization by developing a general theory of categories that admit abstract ana…
Graph canonization is the problem of computing a unique representative, a canon, from the isomorphism class of a given graph. This implies that two graphs are isomorphic exactly if their canons are equal. We show that graphs of bounded tree width can be canonized by logarithmic-space (logspace) algorithms. This implies that the isomorphism problem for graphs of bounded tree width can be decided in logspace. In the light of isomorphism for trees being hard for the complexity class logspace, this makes the ubiquitous class of graphs of bounded tree width one of the few classes of graphs for whic…
In this article, we study "questionable representations" of (partial or total) orders, introduced in our previous article "A class of orders with linear? time sorting algorithm". (Later, we consider arbitrary binary functional/relational structures instead of orders.) A "question" is the first difference between two sequences (with ordinal index) of elements of orders/sets. In finite width "questionable representations" of an order O, comparison can be solved by looking at the "question" that compares elements of a finite order O'. A corollary of a theorem by Cantor (1895)is that all countable…
To each link $L$ in $S^3$ we associate a collection of certain labelled directed trees, called width trees. We interpret some classical and new topological link invariants in terms of these width trees and show how the geometric structure of the width trees can bound the values of these invariants from below. We also show that each width tree is associated with a knot in $S^3$ and that if it also meets a high enough "distance threshold" it is, up to a certain equivalence, the unique width tree realizing the invariants.
By the Grid Minor Theorem of Robertson and Seymour, every graph of sufficiently large tree-width contains a large grid as a minor. Tree-width may therefore be regarded as a measure of 'grid-likeness' of a graph. The grid contains a long cycle on the perimeter, which is the $\mathbb{F}_2$-sum of the rectangles inside. Moreover, the grid distorts the metric of the cycle only by a factor of two. We prove that every graph that resembles the grid in this algebraic sense has large tree-width: Let $k, p$ be integers, $γ$ a real number and $G$ a graph. Suppose that $G$ contains a cycle of length at le…