A Randomized Polynomial Kernelization for Vertex Cover with a Smaller Parameter

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Abstract: In the Vertex Cover problem we are given a graph G=(V,E) and an integer k and have to determine whether there is a set XsubseteqV of size at most k such that each edge in E has at least one endpoint in X. The problem can be easily solved in time O∗(2k), making it fixed-parameter tractable (FPT) with respect to k. While the fastest known algorithm takes only time O∗(1.2738k), much stronger improvements have been obtained by studying parameters that are smaller than k. Apart from treewidth-related results, the arguably best algorithm for Vertex Cover runs in time O∗(2.3146p), where p=k−LP(G) is only the excess of the solution size k over the best fractional vertex cover (Lokshtanov et al. TALG 2014). Since pleqk but k cannot be bounded in terms of p alone, this strictly increases the range of tractable instances. Recently, Garg and Philip (SODA 2016) greatly contributed to understanding the parameterized complexity of the Vertex Cover problem. They prove that 2LP(G)−MM(G) is a lower bound for the vertex cover size of G, where MM(G) is the size of a largest matching of G, and proceed to study parameter ell=k−(2LP(G)−MM(G)). They give an algorithm of running time O∗(3ell), proving that Vertex Cover is FPT in ell. It can be easily observed that ellleqp whereas p cannot be bounded in terms of ell alone. We complement the work of Garg and Philip by proving that Vertex Cover admits a randomized polynomial kernelization in terms of ell, i.e., an efficient preprocessing to size polynomial in ell. This improves over parameter p=k−LP(G) for which this was previously known (Kratsch and Wahlstr"om FOCS 2012).












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