Graph Editing to a Given Neighbourhood Degree List is Fixed-Parameter Tractable

Abstract

Graph editing problems have a long history and have been widely studied, with applications in biochemistry and complex network analysis. They generally ask whether an input graph can be modified by inserting and deleting vertices and edges to a graph with the desired property. We consider the problem \textsc{Graph-Edit-to-NDL} (GEN) where the goal is to modify to a graph with a given neighbourhood degree list (NDL). The NDL lists the degrees of the neighbours of vertices in a graph, and is a stronger invariant than the degree sequence, which lists the degrees of vertices.

We show \textsc{Graph-Edit-to-NDL} is NP-complete and study its parameterized complexity. In parameterized complexity, a problem is said to be fixed-parameter tractable with respect to a parameter if it has a solution whose running time is a function that is polynomial in the input size but possibly superpolynomial in the parameter.

Golovach and Mertzios [ICSSR, 2016] studied editing to a graph with a given degree sequence and showed the problem is fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized by $\Delta+\ell$, where $\Delta$ is the maximum degree of the input graph and $\ell$ is the number of edits. We prove \textsc{Graph-Edit-to-NDL} is fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized by $\Delta+\ell$.

Furthermore, we consider a harder problem \textsc{Constrained-Graph-Edit-to-NDL} (CGEN) that imposes constraints on the NDLs of intermediate graphs produced in the sequence. We adapt our FPT algorithm for \textsc{Graph-Edit-to-NDL} to solve \textsc{Constrained-Graph-Edit-to-NDL}, which proves \textsc{Constrained-Graph-Edit-to-NDL} is also fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized by $\Delta+\ell$.

Our results imply that, for graph properties that can be expressed as properties of NDLs, editing to a graph with such a property is fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized by $\Delta+\ell$. We show that this family of graph properties includes some well-known graph measures used in complex network analysis.