Neighborhood reconstruction and cancellation of graphs

TL;DR

This paper explores the relationship between neighborhood reconstruction and graph cancellation, proving they are equivalent concepts and providing new insights into conditions for graph isomorphism based on neighborhood multisets.

Contribution

It establishes the equivalence between neighborhood-reconstructible graphs and cancellation graphs, and offers new results on cancellation conditions for graph products.

Findings

Neighborhood-reconstructible graphs are exactly the cancellation graphs.

New conditions identified for when graph products preserve isomorphism.

Implications for graph isomorphism problems based on neighborhood multisets.

Abstract

We connect two seemingly unrelated problems in graph theory. Any graph $G$ has an associated neighborhood multiset $\mathscr{N}(G)= \{N(x) \mid x\in V(G)\}$ whose elements are precisely the open vertex-neighborhoods of $G$. In general there exist non-isomorphic graphs $G$ and $H$ for which $\mathscr{N}(G)=\mathscr{N}(H)$. The neighborhood reconstruction problem asks the conditions under which $G$ is uniquely reconstructible from its neighborhood multiset, that is, the conditions under which $\mathscr{N}(G)=\mathscr{N}(H)$ implies $G\cong H$. Such a graph is said to be neighborhood-reconstructible. The cancellation problem for the direct product of graphs seeks the conditions under which $G\times K\cong H\times K$ implies $G\cong H$. Lovasz proved that this is indeed the case if $K$ is not bipartite. A second instance of the cancellation problem asks for conditions on $G$ that assure $G\times K\cong H\times K$ implies $G\cong H$ for any bipartite graph $K$ with $E(K)\neq \emptyset$. A graph $G$ for which this is true is called a cancellation graph. We prove that the neighborhood-reconstructible graphs are precisely the cancellation graphs. We also present some new results on cancellation graphs, which have corresponding implications for neighborhood reconstruction.