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DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.WADS.2025.43

On the Complexity of Finding 1-Center Spanning Trees

Authors: Pin-Hsian Lee, Meng-Tsung Tsai, and Hung-Lung Wang

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 349, 19th International Symposium on Algorithms and Data Structures (WADS 2025)

Abstract

We consider the problem of finding a spanning tree T of a given undirected graph G such that any other spanning tree can be obtained from T by removing k edges and subsequently adding k edges, where k is minimized over all spanning trees of G. We refer to this minimum k as the treeradius of G. Treeradius is an interesting graph parameter with natural interpretations: (1) It is the smallest radius of a Hamming ball centered at an extreme point of the spanning tree polytope that covers the entire polytope. (2) Any graph with bounded treeradius also has bounded treewidth. Consequently, if a problem admits a fixed-parameter algorithm parameterized by treewidth, it also admits a fixed-parameter algorithm parameterized by treeradius. In this paper, we show that computing the exact treeradius for n-vertex graphs requires 2^Ω(n) time under the Exponential Time Hypothesis (ETH) and does not admit a PTAS, with an inapproximability bound of 1153/1152, unless P = NP. This hardness result is surprising, as treeradius has significantly higher ETH complexity compared to analogous problems on shortest path polytopes and star subgraph polytopes.

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Pin-Hsian Lee, Meng-Tsung Tsai, and Hung-Lung Wang. On the Complexity of Finding 1-Center Spanning Trees. In 19th International Symposium on Algorithms and Data Structures (WADS 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 349, pp. 43:1-43:19, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{lee_et_al:LIPIcs.WADS.2025.43,
  author =	{Lee, Pin-Hsian and Tsai, Meng-Tsung and Wang, Hung-Lung},
  title =	{{On the Complexity of Finding 1-Center Spanning Trees}},
  booktitle =	{19th International Symposium on Algorithms and Data Structures (WADS 2025)},
  pages =	{43:1--43:19},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-398-0},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{349},
  editor =	{Morin, Pat and Oh, Eunjin},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.WADS.2025.43},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-242743},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.WADS.2025.43},
  annote =	{Keywords: Treeradius, Spanning tree polytope, Shortest s, t-path polytope}
}

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On the Complexity of Finding 1-Center Spanning Trees

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