Related papers: An Approximation Algorithm for Covering Vertices b…
This paper studies $MPC^{5+}_v$, which is to cover as many vertices as possible in a given graph $G=(V,E)$ by vertex-disjoint $5^+$-paths (i.e., paths each with at least five vertices). $MPC^{5+}_v$ is NP-hard and admits an existing…
Given a graph, the general problem to cover the maximum number of vertices by a collection of vertex-disjoint long paths seemingly escapes from the literature. A path containing at least $k$ vertices is considered long. When $k \le 3$, the…
Given a graph $G = (V, E)$, the $3$-path partition problem is to find a minimum collection of vertex-disjoint paths each of order at most $3$ to cover all the vertices of $V$. It is different from but closely related to the well-known…
Recently, there has been increasing interest and progress in improvising the approximation algorithm for well-known NP-Complete problems, particularly the approximation algorithm for the Vertex-Cover problem. Here we have proposed a…
In the 4-path vertex cover problem, the input is an undirected graph $G$ and an integer $k$. The goal is to decide whether there is a set of vertices $S$ of size at most $k$ such that every path with 4 vertices in $G$ contains at least one…
Given an edge-weighted (metric/general) complete graph with $n$ vertices, the maximum weight (metric/general) $k$-cycle/path packing problem is to find a set of $\frac{n}{k}$ vertex-disjoint $k$-cycles/paths such that the total weight is…
Path cover is a well-known intractable problem that finds a minimum number of vertex disjoint paths in a given graph to cover all the vertices. We show that a variant, where the objective function is not the number of paths but the number…
Given a simple graph $G = (V, E)$ and a constant integer $k \ge 2$, the $k$-path vertex cover problem ({\sc P$k$VC}) asks for a minimum subset $F \subseteq V$ of vertices such that the induced subgraph $G[V - F]$ does not contain any path…
We examine the possibility of approximating Maximum Vertex-Disjoint Shortest Paths. In this problem, the input is an edge-weighted (directed or undirected) $n$-vertex graph $G$ along with $k$ terminal pairs…
In the classical Node-Disjoint Paths (NDP) problem, the input consists of an undirected $n$-vertex graph $G$, and a collection $\mathcal{M}=\{(s_1,t_1),\ldots,(s_k,t_k)\}$ of pairs of its vertices, called source-destination, or demand,…
Motivated by applications to social network analysis (SNA), we study the problem of finding the maximum number of disjoint uni-color paths in an edge-colored graph. We show the NP-hardness and the approximability of the problem, and both…
Given a directed graph $G = (V, E)$, the $k$-path partition problem is to find a minimum collection of vertex-disjoint directed paths each of order at most $k$ to cover all the vertices of $V$. The problem has various applications in…
Given a fixed positive integer $k$ and a simple undirected graph $G = (V, E)$, the {\em $k^-$-path partition} problem, denoted by $k$PP for short, aims to find a minimum collection $\cal{P}$ of vertex-disjoint paths in $G$ such that each…
We give a nearly optimal sublinear-time algorithm for approximating the size of a minimum vertex cover in a graph G. The algorithm may query the degree deg(v) of any vertex v of its choice, and for each 1 <= i <= deg(v), it may ask for the…
Given an undirected graph, $G$, and vertices, $s$ and $t$ in $G$, the tracking paths problem is that of finding the smallest subset of vertices in $G$ whose intersection with any $s$-$t$ path results in a unique sequence. This problem is…
An instance of the Connected Maximum Cut problem consists of an undirected graph G = (V, E) and the goal is to find a subset of vertices S $\subseteq$ V that maximizes the number of edges in the cut \delta(S) such that the induced graph…
The problem of finding an optimal vertex cover in a graph is a classic NP-complete problem, and is a special case of the hitting set question. On the other hand, the hitting set problem, when asked in the context of induced geometric…
We consider the maximum vertex-weighted matching problem (MVM) for non-bipartite graphs. In earlier work we have described a 2/3-approximation algorithm for the MVM on bipartite graphs (Dobrian, Halappanavar, Pothen and Al-Herz, SIAM J.…
The Longest Path Problem is a question of finding the maximum length between pairs of vertices of a graph. In the general case, the problem is NP-complete. However, there is a small collection of graph classes for which there exists an…
In graph theory, the longest path problem is the problem of finding a simple path of maximum length in a given graph. For some small classes of graphs, the problem can be solved in polynomial time [2, 4], but it remains NP-hard on general…