Long Circuits and Large Euler Subgraphs

TL;DR

This paper investigates the parameterized complexity of finding large Eulerian subgraphs and circuits, revealing fixed parameter tractability for undirected graphs and a complexity dichotomy for directed graphs.

Contribution

It establishes that Large Euler Subgraph is FPT on undirected graphs and provides a complexity dichotomy for directed graphs, a novel insight into these problems.

Findings

Large Euler Subgraph is FPT on undirected graphs.

NP-hardness for fixed k>3 on directed graphs.

Polynomial-time solvable for k<=3 on directed graphs.

Abstract

An undirected graph is Eulerian if it is connected and all its vertices are of even degree. Similarly, a directed graph is Eulerian, if for each vertex its in-degree is equal to its out-degree. It is well known that Eulerian graphs can be recognized in polynomial time while the problems of finding a maximum Eulerian subgraph or a maximum induced Eulerian subgraph are NP-hard. In this paper, we study the parameterized complexity of the following Euler subgraph problems: - Large Euler Subgraph: For a given graph G and integer parameter k, does G contain an induced Eulerian subgraph with at least k vertices? - Long Circuit: For a given graph G and integer parameter k, does G contain an Eulerian subgraph with at least k edges? Our main algorithmic result is that Large Euler Subgraph is fixed parameter tractable (FPT) on undirected graphs. We find this a bit surprising because the problem of finding an induced Eulerian subgraph with exactly k vertices is known to be W[1]-hard. The complexity of the problem changes drastically on directed graphs. On directed graphs we obtained the following complexity dichotomy: Large Euler Subgraph is NP-hard for every fixed k>3 and is solvable in polynomial time for k<=3. For Long Circuit, we prove that the problem is FPT on directed and undirected graphs.