A critical probability for biclique partition of Gn,p

Abstract

The biclique partition number of a graph G=(V,E), denoted bp(G), is the minimum number of pairwise edge disjoint complete bipartite subgraphs of G so that each edge of G belongs to exactly one of them. It is easy to see that bp(G)≤n−α(G), where α(G) is the maximum size of an independent set of G. Erdős conjectured in the 80's that for almost every graph G equality holds; i.e., if G=Gn,1/2 then bp(G)=n−α(G) with high probability. Alon showed that this is false. We show that the conjecture of Erdős is true if we instead take G=Gn,p, where p is constant and less than a certain threshold value p0≈0.312. This verifies a conjecture of Chung and Peng for these values of p. We also show that if p0<p<1/2 then bp(Gn,p)=n−(1+Θ(1))α(Gn,p) with high probability.