,
Jiří Sgall
,
Andreas Emil Feldmann
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Graph Burning models information spreading in a given graph as a process such that in each step one node is infected (informed) and also the infection spreads to all neighbors of previously infected nodes. Formally, given a graph G = (V,E), possibly with edge lengths, the burning number b(G) is the minimum number g such that there exist nodes v_0,…,v_{g-1} ∈ V satisfying the property that for each u ∈ V there exists i ∈ {0,…,g-1} so that the distance between u and v_i is at most i.
We present a randomized 2.314-approximation algorithm for computing the burning number of a general graph, even with arbitrary edge lengths. We complement this by an approximation lower bound of 2 for the case of equal length edges, and a lower bound of 4/3 for the case when edges are restricted to have length 1.
This improves on the previous 3-approximation algorithm and an APX-hardness result.
@InProceedings{lieskovsky_et_al:LIPIcs.APPROX/RANDOM.2023.9,
author = {Lieskovsk\'{y}, Matej and Sgall, Ji\v{r}{\'\i} and Feldmann, Andreas Emil},
title = {{Approximation Algorithms and Lower Bounds for Graph Burning}},
booktitle = {Approximation, Randomization, and Combinatorial Optimization. Algorithms and Techniques (APPROX/RANDOM 2023)},
pages = {9:1--9:17},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-296-9},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2023},
volume = {275},
editor = {Megow, Nicole and Smith, Adam},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.APPROX/RANDOM.2023.9},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-188345},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.APPROX/RANDOM.2023.9},
annote = {Keywords: Graph Algorithms, approximation Algorithms, randomized Algorithms}
}