Node-and edge-deletion NP-complete problems

  • Authors:
  • Mihalis Yannakakis

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • STOC '78 Proceedings of the tenth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
  • Year:
  • 1978

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Abstract

If &pgr; is a graph property, the general node(edge) deletion problem can be stated as follows: Find the minimum number of nodes(edges), whose deletion results in a subgraph satisfying property &pgr;. In this paper we show that if &pgr; belongs to a rather broad class of properties (the class of properties that are hereditary on induced subgraphs) then the node-deletion problem is NP-complete, and the same is true for several restrictions of it. For the same class of properties, requiring the remaining graph to be connected does not change the NP-complete status of the problem; moreover for a certain subclass, finding any "reasonable" approximation is also NP-complete. Edge-deletion problems seem to be less amenable to such generalizations. We show however that for several common properties (e.g. planar, outer-planar, line-graph, transitive digraph) the edge-deletion problem is NP-complete.