,
Nidhi Purohit
,
Kirill Simonov
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
In Clique Cover, given a graph G and an integer k, the task is to partition the vertices of G into k cliques. Clique Cover on unit ball graphs has a natural interpretation as a clustering problem, where the objective function is the maximum diameter of a cluster.
Many classical NP-hard problems are known to admit 2^{O(n^{1 - 1/d})}-time algorithms on unit ball graphs in ℝ^d [de Berg et al., SIAM J. Comp 2018]. A notable exception is the Maximum Clique problem, which admits a polynomial-time algorithm on unit disk graphs and a subexponential algorithm on unit ball graphs in ℝ³, but no subexponential algorithm on unit ball graphs in dimensions 4 or larger, assuming the ETH [Bonamy et al., JACM 2021].
In this work, we show that Clique Cover also suffers from a "curse of dimensionality", albeit in a significantly different way compared to Maximum Clique. We present a 2^{O(√n)}-time algorithm for unit disk graphs and argue that it is tight under the ETH. On the other hand, we show that Clique Cover does not admit a 2^{o(n)}-time algorithm on unit ball graphs in dimension 5, unless the ETH fails.
@InProceedings{koana_et_al:LIPIcs.IPEC.2024.10,
author = {Koana, Tomohiro and Purohit, Nidhi and Simonov, Kirill},
title = {{Subexponential Algorithms for Clique Cover on Unit Disk and Unit Ball Graphs}},
booktitle = {19th International Symposium on Parameterized and Exact Computation (IPEC 2024)},
pages = {10:1--10:17},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-353-9},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2024},
volume = {321},
editor = {Bonnet, \'{E}douard and Rz\k{a}\.{z}ewski, Pawe{\l}},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.IPEC.2024.10},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-222369},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.IPEC.2024.10},
annote = {Keywords: Clique cover, diameter clustering, subexponential algorithms, unit disk graphs}
}