Polynomial delay algorithm for minimal chordal completions

TL;DR

This paper presents a polynomial delay and polynomial space algorithm for listing all minimal chordal completions of a graph, improving upon previous methods with quadratic time complexity in the number of solutions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel polynomial delay algorithm using proximity search and a new method called canonical path reconstruction for efficient enumeration.

Findings

Algorithm runs in polynomial delay and space.

Improves efficiency over previous exponential space algorithms.

Provides a practical method for enumerating minimal chordal completions.

Abstract

Motivated by the problem of enumerating all tree decompositions of a graph, we consider in this article the problem of listing all the minimal chordal completions of a graph. In \cite{carmeli2020} (\textsc{Pods 2017}) Carmeli \emph{et al.} proved that all minimal chordal completions or equivalently all proper tree decompositions of a graph can be listed in incremental polynomial time using exponential space. The total running time of their algorithm is quadratic in the number of solutions and the existence of an algorithm whose complexity depends only linearly on the number of solutions remained open. We close this question by providing a polynomial delay algorithm to solve this problem which, moreover, uses polynomial space. Our algorithm relies on \emph{Proximity Search}, a framework recently introduced by Conte \emph{et al.} \cite{conte-uno2019} (\textsc{Stoc 2019}) which has been shown powerful to obtain polynomial delay algorithms, but generally requires exponential space. In order to obtain a polynomial space algorithm for our problem, we introduce a new general method called \emph{canonical path reconstruction} to design polynomial delay and polynomial space algorithms based on proximity search.