Exactness of Parrilo's conic approximations for copositive matrices and associated low order bounds for the stability number of a graph

TL;DR

This paper investigates the exactness of Parrilo's conic approximations for copositive matrices and their application to bounds on the stability number of graphs, disproving a related conjecture and analyzing graph classes.

Contribution

It characterizes graphs where the bounds are exact at low orders, reduces the problem to critical graphs, and disproves a conjecture linking these bounds to the stability number.

Findings

Disproves Gvozdenović and Laurent's conjecture on bounds exactness.

Characterizes critical graphs with exact bounds at order zero.

Shows exactness at order one is not preserved under adding isolated nodes.

Abstract

De Klerk and Pasechnik (2002) introduced the bounds $\vartheta^{(r)}(G)$ ($r\in \mathbb{N}$) for the stability number $\alpha(G)$ of a graph $G$ and conjectured exactness at order $\alpha(G)-1$: $\vartheta^{(\alpha(G)-1)}(G)=\alpha(G)$. These bounds rely on the conic approximations $\mathcal{K}_n^{(r)}$ by Parrilo (2000) for the copositive cone $\text{COP}_n$. A difficulty in the convergence analysis of $\vartheta^{(r)}$ is the bad behaviour of the cones $\mathcal{K}_n^{(r)}$ under adding a zero row/column: when applied to a matrix not in $\mathcal{K}^{(0)}_n$ this gives a matrix not in any ${\mathcal{K}}^{(r)}_{n+1}$, thereby showing strict inclusion $\bigcup_{r\ge 0}{\mathcal{K}}^{(r)}_n\subset \text{COP}_n$ for $n\ge 6$. We investigate the graphs with $\vartheta^{(r)}(G)=\alpha(G)$ for $r=0,1$: we algorithmically reduce testing exactness of $\vartheta^{(0)}$ to acritical graphs, we characterize critical graphs with $\vartheta^{(0)}$ exact, and we exhibit graphs for which exactness of $\vartheta^{(1)}$ is not preserved under adding an isolated node. This disproves a conjecture by Gvozdenovi\'c and Laurent (2007) which, if true, would have implied the above conjecture by de Klerk and Pasechnik.