Preprocessing Subgraph and Minor Problems: When Does a Small Vertex Cover Help?

Abstract

We prove a number of results around kernelization of problems parameterized by a vertex cover of the input graph. We provide two simple general conditions characterizing problems admitting kernels of polynomial size. Our characterizations not only give generic explanations for the existence of many known polynomial kernels for problems like Odd Cycle Transversal, Chordal Deletion, η -Transversal, Long Path, Long Cycle, or H -packing, parameterized by the size of a vertex cover, they also imply new polynomial kernels for problems like $\mathcal{F}$-Minor-Free-Deletion, which is to delete at most k vertices to obtain a graph with no minor from a fixed finite set $\mathcal{F}$.

While our characterization captures many interesting problems, the kernelization complexity landscape of problems parameterized by vertex cover is much more involved. We demonstrate this by several results about induced subgraph and minor containment, which we find surprising. While it was known that testing for an induced complete subgraph has no polynomial kernel unless NP ⊆ coNP/poly, we show that the problem of testing if a graph contains a complete graph on t vertices as a minor admits a polynomial kernel. On the other hand, it was known that testing for a path on t vertices as a minor admits a polynomial kernel, but we show that testing for containment of an induced path on t vertices is unlikely to admit a polynomial kernel.

This work was supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), project “KERNELS: Combinatorial Analysis of Data Reduction”, and by the European Research Council (ERC) grant “Rigorous Theory of Preprocessing”, reference 267959.