Related papers: The Parameterized Complexity of Finding Minimum Bo…
Parameterized complexity enables the practical solution of generally intractable NP-hard problems when certain parameters are small, making it particularly useful in real-world applications. The study of string problems in this framework…
In the Shortest Superstring problem we are given a set of strings $S=\{s_1, \ldots, s_n\}$ and integer $\ell$ and the question is to decide whether there is a superstring $s$ of length at most $\ell$ containing all strings of $S$ as…
Minimum sum vertex cover of an $n$-vertex graph $G$ is a bijection $\phi : V(G) \to [n]$ that minimizes the cost $\sum_{\{u,v\} \in E(G)} \min \{\phi(u), \phi(v) \}$. Finding a minimum sum vertex cover of a graph (the MSVC problem) is…
We are studying $d$-dimensional geometric problems that have algorithms with $1-1/d$ appearing in the exponent of the running time, for example, in the form of $2^{n^{1-1/d}}$ or $n^{k^{1-1/d}}$. This means that these algorithms perform…
We consider two matrix completion problems, in which we are given a matrix with missing entries and the task is to complete the matrix in a way that (1) minimizes the rank, or (2) minimizes the number of distinct rows. We study the…
Motivated by the study of genome rearrangements, the NP-hard Minimum Common String Partition problems asks, given two strings, to split both strings into an identical set of blocks. We consider an extension of this problem to unbalanced…
In this paper we study the problem of finding a small safe set $S$ in a graph $G$, i.e. a non-empty set of vertices such that no connected component of $G[S]$ is adjacent to a larger component in $G - S$. We enhance our understanding of the…
Parameterized complexity seeks to use input structure to obtain faster algorithms for NP-hard problems. This has been most successful for graphs of low treewidth: Many problems admit fast algorithms relative to treewidth and many of them…
A minimum path cover (MPC) of a directed acyclic graph (DAG) $G = (V,E)$ is a minimum-size set of paths that together cover all the vertices of the DAG. Computing an MPC is a basic polynomial problem, dating back to Dilworth's and…
Given a digraph $D$, the Minimum Leaf Out-Branching problem (MinLOB) is the problem of finding in $D$ an out-branching with the minimum possible number of leaves, i.e., vertices of out-degree 0. We prove that MinLOB is polynomial-time…
The parameterized complexity of problems is often studied with respect to the size of their optimal solutions. However, for a maximization problem, the size of the optimal solution can be very large, rendering algorithms parameterized by it…
MaxCut is a classical NP-complete problem and a crucial building block in many combinatorial algorithms. The famous Edwards-Erd\H{o}s bound states that any connected graph on n vertices with m edges contains a cut of size at least $m/2 +…
A set $D$ of vertices of a graph is a \emph{defensive alliance} if, for each element of $D$, the majority of its neighbours are in $D$. We consider the notion of local minimality in this paper. We are interested in finding a locally minimal…
We show that Closest Substring, one of the most important problems in the field of biological sequence analysis, is W[1]-hard when parameterized by the number k of input strings (and remains so, even over a binary alphabet). This problem is…
Given an ordering of the vertices of a graph, the cost of covering an edge is the smaller number of its two ends. The minimum sum vertex cover problem asks for an ordering that minimizes the total cost of covering all edges. We consider…
We consider the classical Minimum Balanced Cut problem: given a graph $G$, compute a partition of its vertices into two subsets of roughly equal volume, while minimizing the number of edges connecting the subsets. We present the first {\em…
We revisit the deadline version of the discrete time-cost tradeoff problem for the special case of bounded depth. Such instances occur for example in VLSI design. The depth of an instance is the number of jobs in a longest chain and is…
We study the parameterized complexity of separating a small set of vertices from a graph by a small vertex-separator. That is, given a graph $G$ and integers $k$, $t$, the task is to find a vertex set $X$ with $|X| \le k$ and $|N(X)| \le…
We investigate parameterized algorithms for the NP-hard problem Min-Power Asymmetric Connectivity (MinPAC) that has applications in wireless sensor networks. Given a directed arc-weighted graph, MinPAC asks for a strongly connected spanning…
The paper deals with finite-state Markov decision processes (MDPs) with integer weights assigned to each state-action pair. New algorithms are presented to classify end components according to their limiting behavior with respect to the…