On the complexity of coloring ‐graphs

Abstract

AbstractAn ‐graph is a graph that can be partitioned into r independent sets and ℓ cliques. In the Graph Coloring problem, we are given as input a graph G, and the objective is to determine the minimum integer k such that G admits a proper vertex k‐coloring. In this work, we describe a Poly versus NP‐hard dichotomy of this problem regarding the parameters r and ℓ of ‐graphs, which determine the boundaries of the ‐hardness of Graph Coloring for such classes. We also analyze the complexity of the problem on ()‐graphs under the parameterized complexity perspective. We show that given a (2, 1)‐partition of a graph G, finding an optimal coloring of G is ‐complete even when K1 is a maximal clique of size 3; XP but W[1]‐hard when parameterized by ; fixed‐parameter tractable (FPT) and admits a polynomial kernel when parameterized by . Besides, concerning the case where K1 is a maximal clique of size 3, a P versus NPh dichotomy regarding the neighborhood of K1 is provided; furthermore, an FPT algorithm parameterized by the number of vertices having no neighbor in K1 is presented.