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Related papers: Coarse Balanced Separators and Tree-Decompositions

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The branchwidth of a graph has been introduced by Roberson and Seymour as a measure of the tree-decomposability of a graph, alternative to treewidth. Branchwidth is polynomially computable on planar graphs by the celebrated ``Ratcatcher''…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-01-29 Dimitrios M. Thilikos , Sebastian Wiederrecht

Tree-decompositions and treewidth are of fundamental importance in structural and algorithmic graph theory. The "spread" of a tree-decomposition is the minimum integer $s$ such that every vertex lies in at most $s$ bags. A…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-04-08 Marc Distel , Neel Kaul , Raj Kaul , David R. Wood

A connected partition is a partition of the vertices of a graph into sets that induce connected subgraphs. Such partitions naturally occur in many application areas such as road networks, and image processing. We consider Balanced Connected…

Quasi-isometry is a measure of how similar two graphs are at `large-scale'. Nguyen, Scott, and Seymour [arXiv:2501.09839] and Hickingbotham [arXiv:2501.10840] independently gave a characterisation of graphs quasi-isometric to graphs of…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-12-29 Marc Distel

This paper is motivated by the following question: what are the unavoidable induced subgraphs of graphs with large treewidth? Aboulker et al. made a conjecture which answers this question in graphs of bounded maximum degree, asserting that…

In recent years, there has been significant interest in characterizing the induced subgraph obstructions to bounded treewidth and pathwidth. While this has recently been resolved for pathwidth, the case of treewidth remains open, and prior…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-07-31 Maria Chudnovsky , David Fischer , Sepehr Hajebi , Sophie Spirkl , Bartosz Walczak

In this paper, our goal is to characterize two graph classes based on the properties of minimal vertex (edge) separators. We first present a structural characterization of graphs in which every minimal vertex separator is a stable set. We…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2011-03-16 Mrinal Kumar , Gaurav Maheswari , N. Sadagopan

A cornerstone theorem in the Graph Minors series of Robertson and Seymour is the result that every graph $G$ with no minor isomorphic to a fixed graph $H$ has a certain structure. The structure can then be exploited to deduce far-reaching…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2021-01-05 Ken-ichi Kawarabayashi , Robin Thomas , Paul Wollan

We present a method for reducing the treewidth of a graph while preserving all the minimal $s-t$ separators. This technique turns out to be very useful for establishing the fixed-parameter tractability of constrained separation and…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2010-02-03 Dániel Marx , Barry O'Sullivan , Igor Razgon

Understanding the structure of minor-free metrics, namely shortest path metrics obtained over a weighted graph excluding a fixed minor, has been an important research direction since the fundamental work of Robertson and Seymour. A…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-09-11 Vincent Cohen-Addad , Arnold Filtser , Philip N. Klein , Hung Le

A circle graph is an intersection graph of a set of chords of a circle. We describe the unavoidable induced subgraphs of circle graphs with large treewidth. This includes examples that are far from the `usual suspects'. Our results imply…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2022-12-23 Robert Hickingbotham , Freddie Illingworth , Bojan Mohar , David R. Wood

We continue the study of $(tw,\omega)$-bounded graph classes, that is, hereditary graph classes in which large treewidth is witnessed by the presence of a large clique, and the relation of this property to boundedness of the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-05-20 Claire Hilaire , Martin Milanič , Đorđe Vasić

In 1990, Alon, Seymour, and Thomas gave the first balanced separator of size $O(h^{3/2}\sqrt{n})$ for any $K_h$-minor-free graph, which has had numerous algorithmic applications. They conjectured that the size of the balanced separator can…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Hung Le

Unlike minors, the induced subgraph obstructions to bounded treewidth come in a large variety, including, for every $t\geq 1$, the $t$-basic obstructions: the graphs $K_{t+1}$ and $K_{t,t}$, along with the subdivisions of the $t$-by-$t$…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-12-02 Bogdan Alecu , Maria Chudnovsky , Sepehr Hajebi , Sophie Spirkl

We introduce the notion of \emph{bounded diameter arboricity}. Specifically, the \emph{diameter-$d$ arboricity} of a graph is the minimum number $k$ such that the edges of the graph can be partitioned into $k$ forests each of whose…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2016-08-19 Martin Merker , Luke Postle

It is proven that a connected graph is planar if and only if all its cocycles with at least four edges are "grounded" in the graph. The notion of grounding of this planarity criterion, which is purely combinatorial, stems from the intuitive…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2014-10-22 K. Dosen , Z. Petric

An independent set of size $k$ in a finite undirected graph $G$ is a set of $k$ vertices of the graph, no two of which are connected by an edge. Let $x_{k}(G)$ be the number of independent sets of size $k$ in the graph $G$ and let…

Probability · Mathematics 2020-06-09 Steven Heilman

We consider a the minimum k-way cut problem for unweighted graphs with a size bound s on the number of cut edges allowed. Thus we seek to remove as few edges as possible so as to split a graph into k components, or report that this requires…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2011-01-27 Ken-ichi Kawarabayashi , Mikkel Thorup

Birmele [J. Graph Theory, 2003] proved that every graph with circumference t has treewidth at most t-1. Under the additional assumption of 2-connectivity, such graphs have bounded pathwidth, which is a qualitatively stronger result.…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2015-06-08 Emily A. Marshall , David R. Wood

Fat minors are a coarse analogue of graph minors where the subgraphs modeling vertices and edges of the embedded graph are required to be distant from each other, instead of just being disjoint. In this paper, we give a coarse analogue of…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-04-14 Édouard Bonnet , Hung Le , Marcin Pilipczuk , Michał Pilipczuk