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Vizing’s theorem asserts the existence of a (Δ+1)-edge coloring for any graph G, where Δ = Δ(G) denotes the maximum degree of G. Several polynomial time (Δ+1)-edge coloring algorithms are known, and the state-of-the-art running time (up to polylogarithmic factors) is Õ(min{m √n, m Δ}), by Gabow, Nishizeki, Kariv, Leven and Terada from 1985, where n and m denote the number of vertices and edges in the graph, respectively. Recently, Sinnamon shaved off a polylog(n) factor from the time bound of Gabow et al.
The arboricity α = α(G) of a graph G is the minimum number of edge-disjoint forests into which its edge set can be partitioned, and it is a measure of the graph’s "uniform density". While α ≤ Δ in any graph, many natural and real-world graphs exhibit a significant separation between α and Δ.
In this work we design a (Δ+1)-edge coloring algorithm with a running time of Õ(min{m √n, m Δ})⋅ α/Δ, thus improving the longstanding time barrier by a factor of α/Δ. In particular, we achieve a near-linear runtime for bounded arboricity graphs (i.e., α = Õ(1)) as well as when α = Õ(Δ/√n). Our algorithm builds on Gabow et al.’s and Sinnamon’s algorithms, and can be viewed as a density-sensitive refinement of them.
@InProceedings{bhattacharya_et_al:LIPIcs.ESA.2024.23,
author = {Bhattacharya, Sayan and Costa, Mart{\'\i}n and Panski, Nadav and Solomon, Shay},
title = {{Density-Sensitive Algorithms for (\Delta + 1)-Edge Coloring}},
booktitle = {32nd Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2024)},
pages = {23:1--23:18},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-338-6},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2024},
volume = {308},
editor = {Chan, Timothy and Fischer, Johannes and Iacono, John and Herman, Grzegorz},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2024.23},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-210945},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2024.23},
annote = {Keywords: Graph Algorithms, Edge Coloring, Arboricity}
}