Star partitions and the graph isomorphism problem

Abstract

A canonical basis of R n associated with a graph G on n vertices has been defined in [15] in connection with eigenspaces and star partitions of G. The canonical star basis together with eigenvalues of G determines G to an isomorphism. We study algorithms for finding the canonical basis and some of its variations. The emphasis is on the following three special cases; graphs with distinct eigenvalues, graphs with bounded eigenvalue multiplicities and strongly regular graphs. We show that the procedure is reduced in some parts to special cases of some well known combinatorial optimization problems, such as the maximal matching problem. the minimal cut problem, the maximal clique problem etc. This technique provides another proof of a result of L. Babai et al. [2] that isomorphism testing for graphs with bounded eigenvalue multiplicities can be performend in a polynomial time. We show that the canonical basis in strongly regular graphs is related to the graph decomposition into two strongly regular induced su...