,
William Lochet,
Saket Saurabh
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license
For a fixed graph H, the H-free Edge Editing problem asks whether we can modify a given graph G by adding or deleting at most k edges such that the resulting graph does not contain H as an induced subgraph. The problem is known to be NP-complete for all fixed H with at least 3 vertices and it admits a 2^O(k)n^O(1) algorithm. Cai and Cai [Algorithmica (2015) 71:731–757] showed that, assuming coNP ⊈ NP/poly, H-free Edge Editing does not admit a polynomial kernel whenever H or its complement is a path or a cycle with at least 4 edges or a 3-connected graph with at least one edge missing. Based on their result, very recently Marx and Sandeep [ESA 2020] conjectured that if H is a graph with at least 5 vertices, then H-free Edge Editing has a polynomial kernel if and only if H is a complete or empty graph, unless coNP ⊆ NP/poly. Furthermore they gave a list of 9 graphs, each with five vertices, such that if H-free Edge Editing for these graphs does not admit a polynomial kernel, then the conjecture is true. Therefore, resolving the kernelization of H-free Edge Editing for graphs H with 4 and 5 vertices plays a crucial role in obtaining a complete dichotomy for this problem. In this paper, we positively answer the question of compressibility for one of the last two unresolved graphs H on 4 vertices. Namely, we give the first polynomial kernel for Paw-free Edge Editing with O(k⁶) vertices.
@InProceedings{eiben_et_al:LIPIcs.IPEC.2020.10,
author = {Eiben, Eduard and Lochet, William and Saurabh, Saket},
title = {{A Polynomial Kernel for Paw-Free Editing}},
booktitle = {15th International Symposium on Parameterized and Exact Computation (IPEC 2020)},
pages = {10:1--10:15},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-172-6},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2020},
volume = {180},
editor = {Cao, Yixin and Pilipczuk, Marcin},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.IPEC.2020.10},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-133136},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.IPEC.2020.10},
annote = {Keywords: Kernelization, Paw-free graph, H-free editing, graph modification problem}
}