English

Weighted Treedepth is NP-complete on Graphs of Bounded Degree

Discrete Mathematics 2026-02-05 v2

Abstract

A treedepth decomposition of an undirected graph GG is a rooted forest FF on the vertex set of GG such that every edge uvE(G)uv\in E(G) is in ancestor-descendant relationship in FF. Given a weight function w ⁣:V(G)Nw\colon V(G)\rightarrow \mathbb{N}, the weighted depth of a treedepth decomposition is the maximum weight of any path from the root to a leaf, where the weight of a path is the sum of the weights of its vertices. It is known that deciding weighted treedepth is NP-complete even on trees. We prove that weighted treedepth is also NP-complete on bounded degree graphs. On the positive side, we prove that the problem is efficiently solvable on paths and on 1-subdivided stars.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.18584,
  title  = {Weighted Treedepth is NP-complete on Graphs of Bounded Degree},
  author = {Jona Dirks and Nicole Schirrmacher and Sebastian Siebertz and Alexandre Vigny},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.18584},
  year   = {2026}
}