A dichotomous ordinal graph consists of an undirected graph with a partition of the edges into short and long edges. A geometric realization of a dichotomous ordinal graph G in a metric space X is a drawing of G in X in which every long edge is strictly longer than every short edge. We call a graph G pandichotomous in X if G admits a geometric realization in X for every partition of its edge set into short and long edges. We exhibit a very close relationship between the degeneracy of a graph G and its pandichotomic Euclidean or spherical dimension, that is, the smallest dimension k such that G is pandichotomous in ℝ^k or the sphere 𝒮^k, respectively. First, every d-degenerate graph is pandichotomous in ℝ^d and 𝒮^{d-1} and these bounds are tight for the sphere and for ℝ² and almost tight for ℝ^d, for d ≥ 3. Second, every n-vertex graph that is pandichotomous in ℝ^k has at most μ kn edges, for some absolute constant μ < 7.23. This shows that the pandichotomic Euclidean dimension of any graph is linearly tied to its degeneracy and in the special case k ∈ {1,2} resolves open problems posed by Alam, Kobourov, Pupyrev, and Toeniskoetter. Further, we characterize which complete bipartite graphs are pandichotomous in ℝ²: These are exactly the K_{m,n} with m ≤ 3 or m = 4 and n ≤ 6. For general bipartite graphs, we can guarantee realizations in ℝ² if the short or the long subgraph is constrained: namely if the short subgraph is outerplanar or a subgraph of a rectangular grid, or if the long subgraph forms a caterpillar.
@InProceedings{angelini_et_al:LIPIcs.SoCG.2025.9, author = {Angelini, Patrizio and Cornelsen, Sabine and Haase, Carolina and Hoffmann, Michael and Katsanou, Eleni and Montecchiani, Fabrizio and Steiner, Raphael and Symvonis, Antonios}, title = {{Geometric Realizations of Dichotomous Ordinal Graphs}}, booktitle = {41st International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG 2025)}, pages = {9:1--9:16}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-95977-370-6}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2025}, volume = {332}, editor = {Aichholzer, Oswin and Wang, Haitao}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2025.9}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-231616}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2025.9}, annote = {Keywords: Ordinal embeddings, geometric graphs, graph representations} }
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