English

On Selkow's Bound on the Independence Number of Graphs

Combinatorics 2019-11-19 v2

Abstract

For a graph GG with vertex set V(G)V(G) and independence number α(G)\alpha(G), S. M. Selkow (Discrete Mathematics, 132(1994)363--365) established the famous lower bound vV(G)1d(v)+1(1+max{d(v)d(v)+1uN(v)1d(u)+1,0})\sum\limits_{v\in V(G)}\frac{1}{d(v)+1}(1+\max\{\frac{d(v)}{d(v)+1}-\sum\limits_{u\in N(v)}\frac{1}{d(u)+1},0 \}) on α(G)\alpha(G), where N(v)N(v) and d(v)=N(v)d(v)=|N(v)| denote the neighborhood and the degree of a vertex vV(G)v\in V(G), respectively. However, Selkow's original proof of this result is incorrect. We give a new probabilistic proof of Selkow's bound here.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1705.03779,
  title  = {On Selkow's Bound on the Independence Number of Graphs},
  author = {Jochen Harant and Samuel Mohr},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.03779},
  year   = {2019}
}