Weighted Treedepth is NP-complete on Graphs of Bounded Degree
Discrete Mathematics
2026-02-05 v2
Abstract
A treedepth decomposition of an undirected graph is a rooted forest on the vertex set of such that every edge is in ancestor-descendant relationship in . Given a weight function , 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.
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}
}