Counting Small Induced Subgraphs with Hereditary Properties

TL;DR

This paper classifies the computational complexity of counting induced subgraphs with hereditary properties, showing which are polynomial-time solvable and which are computationally hard, with tight bounds under ETH.

Contribution

It provides a complete classification of the counting problem for hereditary properties, extending previous results and establishing tight complexity bounds under ETH.

Findings

Polynomial-time solvable for trivial hereditary properties.

omplete or ounting or non-trivial hereditary properties.

stablishes TH-based onditional ounds.

Abstract

We study the computational complexity of the problem $\#\text{IndSub}(\Phi)$ of counting $k$-vertex induced subgraphs of a graph $G$ that satisfy a graph property $\Phi$. Our main result establishes an exhaustive and explicit classification for all hereditary properties, including tight conditional lower bounds under the Exponential Time Hypothesis (ETH): - If a hereditary property $\Phi$ is true for all graphs, or if it is true only for finitely many graphs, then $\#\text{IndSub}(\Phi)$ is solvable in polynomial time. - Otherwise, $\#\text{IndSub}(\Phi)$ is $\#\mathsf{W[1]}$-complete when parameterised by $k$, and, assuming ETH, it cannot be solved in time $f(k)\cdot |G|^{o(k)}$ for any function $f$. This classification features a wide range of properties for which the corresponding detection problem (as classified by Khot and Raman [TCS 02]) is tractable but counting is hard. Moreover, even for properties which are already intractable in their decision version, our results yield significantly stronger lower bounds for the counting problem. As additional result, we also present an exhaustive and explicit parameterised complexity classification for all properties that are invariant under homomorphic equivalence. By covering one of the most natural and general notions of closure, namely, closure under vertex-deletion (hereditary), we generalise some of the earlier results on this problem. For instance, our results fully subsume and strengthen the existing classification of $\#\text{IndSub}(\Phi)$ for monotone (subgraph-closed) properties due to Roth, Schmitt, and Wellnitz [FOCS 20].