Quadratic exact-size and linear approximate-size random generation of planar graphs

Abstract

This extended abstract introduces a new algorithm for the random generation of labelled planar graphs. Its principles rely on Boltzmann samplers as recently developed by Duchon, Flajolet, Louchard, and Schaeffer. It combines the Boltzmann framework, a judicious use of rejection, a new combinatorial bijection found by Fusy, Poulalhon and Schaeffer, as well as a precise analytic description of the generating functions counting planar graphs, which was recently obtained by Giménez and Noy. This gives rise to an extremely efficient algorithm for the random generation of planar graphs. There is a preprocessing step of some fixed small cost. Then, for each generation, the time complexity is quadratic for exact-size uniform sampling and linear for approximate-size sampling. This greatly improves on the best previously known time complexity for exact-size uniform sampling of planar graphs with $n$ vertices, which was a little over $\mathcal{O}(n^7)$.