EDGE-DELETION GRAPH PROBLEMS WITH FIRST-ORDER EXPRESSIBLE SUBGRAPH PROPERTIES

Abstract

In this paper edge-deletion problems are studied with a new perspective. In general an edge-deletion problem is of the form: Given a graph G, does it have a subgraph H obtained by deleting zero or more edges such that H satisfies a polynomial-time verifiable property? This paper restricts attention to first-order expressible properties. If the property is expressed by π, which in prenex normal form is Q(Φ) where Q is the quantifier-prefix, then we prove results on the quantifier structure that characterize the complexity of the edge-deletion problem. In particular we give polynomial-time algorithms for problems for which Q is ‘simple’ and in other cases we encode certain NP-complete problems as edge-deletion problems, essentially using the quantifier structure of π. We also present evidence that Q alone cannot capture the complexity of the edge-deletion problem.