Motivated by recent results of Mathieson and Szeider (J. Comput. Syst. Sci. 78(1): 179-191, 2012), we study two graph modification problems where the goal is to obtain a graph whose vertices satisfy certain degree constraints. The Regular Contraction problem takes as input a graph G and two integers d and k, and the task is to decide whether G can be modified into a d-regular graph using at most k edge contractions. The Bounded Degree Contraction problem is defined similarly, but here the objective is to modify G into a graph with maximum degree at most d. We observe that both problems are fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized jointly by k and d. We show that when only k is chosen as the parameter, Regular Contraction becomes W[1]-hard, while Bounded Degree Contraction becomes W[2]-hard even when restricted to split graphs. We also prove both problems to be NP-complete for any fixed d ≥ 2. On the positive side, we show that the problem of deciding whether a graph can be modified into a cycle using at most k edge contractions, which is equivalent to Regular Contraction when d = 2, admits an O(k) vertex kernel. This complements recent results stating that the same holds when the target is a path, but that the problem admits no polynomial kernel when the target is a tree, unless NP ⊆ coNP/poly (Heggernes et al., IPEC 2011). © 2013 Springer International Publishing.
CITATION STYLE
Belmonte, R., Golovach, P. A., Van ’t Hof, P., & Paulusma, D. (2013). Parameterized complexity of two edge contraction problems with degree constraints. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) (Vol. 8246 LNCS, pp. 16–27). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03898-8_3
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