Helsinki Algorithms Seminar: Sumedha Uniyal "A Tight Extremal Bound on the Lovász Cactus Number in Planar Graphs"

A Tight Extremal Bound on the Lovász Cactus Number in Planar Graphs

Sumedha Uniyal
Postdoctoral Researcher at Aalto University

Abstract:

A cactus graph is a graph in which any two cycles are edge-disjoint.We present a constructive proof of the fact that any plane graph G contains a cactus subgraph C where C contains at least a 1/6 fraction of the triangular faces of G. We also show that this ratio cannot be improved by showing a tight lower bound.Together with an algorithm for linear matroid parity, our bound implies two approximation algorithms for computing “dense planar structures” inside any graph: (i) A 1/6 approximation algorithm for, given any graph G, finding a planar subgraph with a maximum number of triangular faces; this improves upon the previous 1/11-approximation; (ii) An alternate (and arguably more illustrative) proof of the 4/9-approximation algorithm for finding a planar subgraph with a maximum number of edges. Our bound is obtained by analyzing a natural local search strategy and heavily exploiting the exchange arguments. Therefore, this suggests the power of local search in handling problems of this kind.

Helsinki Algorithms Seminar is a weekly meeting of researchers in the Helsinki area interested in the art of algorithms and algorithm design, broadly interpreted to cover both theoretical ideas and algorithm engineering on concrete computing platforms. In most cases we have a presentation prepared for each meeting to communicate an idea, a recent result, work-in-progress, or demo, but this should not be at the expense of discussion and simply having fun with algorithms.

Our affiliations are with Aalto University and the University of Helsinki, and accordingly our activities alternate between the Otaniemi Campus of Aalto University and the Kumpula Campus of University of Helsinki, catalyzed by the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT, under the Algorithmic Data Analysis (ADA) programme.