English

Independent sets near the lower bound in bounded degree graphs

Discrete Mathematics 2019-11-05 v2 Combinatorics

Abstract

By Brook's Theorem, every n-vertex graph of maximum degree at most Delta >= 3 and clique number at most Delta is Delta-colorable, and thus it has an independent set of size at least n/Delta. We give an approximate characterization of graphs with independence number close to this bound, and use it to show that the problem of deciding whether such a graph has an indepdendent set of size at least n/Delta+k has a kernel of size O(k).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1609.09134,
  title  = {Independent sets near the lower bound in bounded degree graphs},
  author = {Zdenek Dvorak and Bernard Lidicky},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.09134},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

19 pages, 6 figures; fixes an error pointed out by Andrea Munaro