English

Vertex elimination orderings for hereditary graph classes

Discrete Mathematics 2015-01-26 v3 Combinatorics

Abstract

We provide a general method to prove the existence and compute efficiently elimination orderings in graphs. Our method relies on several tools that were known before, but that were not put together so far: the algorithm LexBFS due to Rose, Tarjan and Lueker, one of its properties discovered by Berry and Bordat, and a local decomposition property of graphs discovered by Maffray, Trotignon and Vu\vskovi\'c. We use this method to prove the existence of elimination orderings in several classes of graphs, and to compute them in linear time. Some of the classes have already been studied, namely even-hole-free graphs, square-theta-free Berge graphs, universally signable graphs and wheel-free graphs. Some other classes are new. It turns out that all the classes that we study in this paper can be defined by excluding some of the so-called Truemper configurations. For several classes of graphs, we obtain directly bounds on the chromatic number, or fast algorithms for the maximum clique problem or the coloring problem.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1205.2535,
  title  = {Vertex elimination orderings for hereditary graph classes},
  author = {Pierre Aboulker and Pierre Charbit and Nicolas Trotignon and Kristina Vuskovic},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1205.2535},
  year   = {2015}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-21T21:02:19.576Z