Parameterized Complexity of Vertex Splitting to Pathwidth at most 1

Abstract

Motivated by the planarization of 2-layered straight-line drawings, we consider the problem of modifying a graph such that the resulting graph has pathwidth at most 1. The problem Pathwidth-One Vertex Explosion (POVE) asks whether such a graph can be obtained using at most k vertex explosions, where a vertex explosion replaces a vertex v by deg(v) degree-1 vertices, each incident to exactly one edge that was originally incident to v. For POVE, we give an FPT algorithm with running time O( 4k • m) and a quadratic kernel, thereby improving over the O(k 6 )-kernel by Ahmed et al. [2] in a more general setting. Similarly, a vertex split replaces a vertex v by two distinct vertices v1 and v2 and distributes the edges originally incident to v arbitrarily to v1 and v2. Analogously to POVE, we define the problem variant Pathwidth-One Vertex Splitting (POVS) that uses the split operation instead of vertex explosions. Here we obtain a linear kernel and an algorithm with running time O((6k + 12) k • m). This answers an open question by Ahmed et al. [2].Finally, we consider the problem Π Vertex Splitting (Π-VS), which generalizes the problem POVS and asks whether a given graph can be turned into a graph of a specific graph class Π using at most k vertex splits. For graph classes Π that can be tested in monadic second-order graph logic (MSO2), we show that the problem Π-VS can be expressed as an MSO2 formula, resulting in an FPT algorithm for Π-VS parameterized by k if Π additionally has bounded treewidth. We obtain the same result for the problem variant using vertex explosions.

Visualization of Bipartite Graphs in Limited Window Size

“…In bipartite graphs arising in domain applications, such as visualizing relationships between anatomical structures and cell types in the human body [7], vertex splitting makes sense only on one side of the layout. Several variants of optimizing such layouts have been recently studied [2,20,3].…”