Upper bound on cubicity in terms of boxicity for graphs of low chromatic number

TL;DR

This paper establishes a new upper bound on the cubicity of graphs in terms of their boxicity and chromatic number, which is tighter for graphs with low chromatic number and nearly tight for some graphs.

Contribution

It introduces a novel upper bound on cubicity based on boxicity and chromatic number, improving previous bounds especially for graphs with bounded chromatic number.

Findings

New upper bound on cubicity in terms of boxicity and chromatic number

Bound is tighter for graphs with low chromatic number

Bound is nearly tight for certain classes of graphs

Abstract

The boxicity (respectively cubicity) of a graph $G$ is the minimum non-negative integer $k$, such that $G$ can be represented as an intersection graph of axis-parallel $k$-dimensional boxes (respectively $k$-dimensional unit cubes) and is denoted by $box(G)$ (respectively $cub(G)$). It was shown by Adiga and Chandran (Journal of Graph Theory, 65(4), 2010) that for any graph $G$, $cub(G) \le$ box$(G) \left \lceil \log_2 \alpha \right \rceil$, where $\alpha = \alpha(G)$ is the cardinality of the maximum independent set in $G$. In this note we show that $cub(G) \le 2 \left \lceil \log_2 \chi(G) \right \rceil box(G) + \chi(G) \left \lceil \log_2 \alpha(G) \right \rceil $. In general, this result can provide a much better upper bound than that of Adiga and Chandran for graph classes with bounded chromatic number. For example, for bipartite graphs we get, $cub(G) \le 2 (box(G) + \left \lceil \log_2 \alpha(G) \right \rceil )$. Moreover we show that for every positive integer $k$, there exist graphs with chromatic number $k$, such that for every $\epsilon > 0$, the value given by our upper bound is at most $(1+\epsilon)$ times their cubicity. Thus, our upper bound is almost tight.