Abstract
A spanning subgraph of a given graph G is called a spanning star forest of G if it is a collection of node-disjoint trees of depth at most 1 (such trees are called stars). The size of a spanning star forest is the number of leaves in all its components. The goal of the spanning star forest problem [12] is to find the maximum-size spanning star forest of a given graph.
In this paper, we study this problem in c-dense graphs, where for c ∈ (0,1), a graph of n vertices is called c-dense if it contains at least cn 2/2 edges [2]. We design a \((\alpha+(1-\alpha)\sqrt{c}-\epsilon)\)-approximation algorithm for spanning star forest in c-dense graphs for any ε> 0, where \(\alpha=\frac{193}{240}\) is the best known approximation ratio of the spanning star forest problem in general graphs [3]. Thus, our approximation ratio outperforms the best known bound for this problem when dealing with c-dense graphs. We also prove that for any c ∈ (0,1), there is a constant ε = ε(c) > 0 such that approximating spanning star forest in c-dense graphs within a factor of 1 − ε is NP-hard. We then demonstrate that for weighted versions (both node- and edge- weighted) of this problem, we cannot get any approximation algorithm with strictly better performance guarantee in c-dense graphs than that of the best possible approximation algorithm for general graphs. Finally, we give strong hardness-of-approximation results for a closely related problem, the minimum dominating set problem, in c-dense graphs.
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He, J., Liang, H. (2010). An Improved Approximation Algorithm for Spanning Star Forest in Dense Graphs. In: Wu, W., Daescu, O. (eds) Combinatorial Optimization and Applications. COCOA 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6509. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17461-2_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17461-2_13
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