Revisiting Path Contraction and Cycle Contraction
<|reference_start|>Revisiting Path Contraction and Cycle Contraction: The Path Contraction and Cycle Contraction problems take as input an undirected graph $G$ with $n$ vertices, $m$ edges and an integer $k$ and determine whether one can obtain a path or a cycle, respectively, by performing at most $k$ edge contractions in $G$. We revisit these NP-complete problems and prove the following results. Path Contraction admits an algorithm running in $\mathcal{O}^*(2^{k})$ time. This improves over the current algorithm known for the problem [Algorithmica 2014]. Cycle Contraction admits an algorithm running in $\mathcal{O}^*((2 + \epsilon_{\ell})^k)$ time where $0 < \epsilon_{\ell} \leq 0.5509$ is inversely proportional to $\ell = n - k$.   Central to these results is an algorithm for a general variant of Path Contraction, namely, Path Contraction With Constrained Ends. We also give an $\mathcal{O}^*(2.5191^n)$-time algorithm to solve the optimization version of Cycle Contraction.   Next, we turn our attention to restricted graph classes and show the following results. Path Contraction on planar graphs admits a polynomial-time algorithm. Path Contraction on chordal graphs does not admit an algorithm running in time $\mathcal{O}(n^{2-\epsilon} \cdot 2^{o(tw)})$ for any $\epsilon > 0$, unless the Orthogonal Vectors Conjecture fails. Here, $tw$ is the treewidth of the input graph. The second result complements the $\mathcal{O}(nm)$-time, i.e., $\mathcal{O}(n^2 \cdot tw)$-time, algorithm known for the problem [Discret. Appl. Math. 2014].<|reference_end|>
@article{krithika2024revisiting,
    title={Revisiting Path Contraction and Cycle Contraction},
    author={R. Krithika, V. K. Kutty Malu and Prafullkumar Tale},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.06290},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2403.06290},
    primaryClass={cs.DS}
}