Faster Treewidth-Based Approximations for Wiener Index

The Wiener index of a graph G is the sum of distances between all pairs of its vertices. It is a widely-used graph property in chemistry, initially introduced to examine the link between boiling points and structural properties of alkanes, which later found notable applications in drug design. Thus, computing or approximating the Wiener index of molecular graphs, i.e. graphs in which every vertex models an atom of a molecule and every edge models a bond, is of significant interest to the computational chemistry community. In this work, we build upon the observation that molecular graphs are sparse and tree-like and focus on developing efficient algorithms parameterized by treewidth to approximate the Wiener index. We present a new randomized approximation algorithm using a combination of tree decompositions and centroid decompositions. Our algorithm approximates the Wiener index within any desired multiplicative factor (1 ± ε) in time O(n ⋅ log n ⋅ k³ + √n ⋅ k/ε²), where n is the number of vertices of the graph and k is the treewidth. This time bound is almost-linear in n. Finally, we provide experimental results over standard benchmark molecules from PubChem and the Protein Data Bank, showcasing the applicability and scalability of our approach on real-world chemical graphs and comparing it with previous methods.