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Title: Constructing near spanning trees with few local inspections
Constructing a spanning tree of a graph is one of the most basic tasks in graph theory. Motivated by several recent studies of local graph algorithms, we consider the following variant of this problem. Let G be a connected bounded-degree graph. Given an edge e in G we would like to decide whether e belongs to a connected subgraph math formula consisting of math formula edges (for a prespecified constant math formula), where the decision for different edges should be consistent with the same subgraph math formula. Can this task be performed by inspecting only a constant number of edges in G? Our main results are: We show that if every t-vertex subgraph of G has expansion math formula then one can (deterministically) construct a sparse spanning subgraph math formula of G using few inspections. To this end we analyze a “local” version of a famous minimum-weight spanning tree algorithm. We show that the above expansion requirement is sharp even when allowing randomization. To this end we construct a family of 3-regular graphs of high girth, in which every t-vertex subgraph has expansion math formula. We prove that for this family of graphs, any local algorithm for the sparse spanning graph problem requires inspecting a number of edges which is proportional to the girth.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1650733
NSF-PAR ID:
10026350
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Random structures & algorithms
Volume:
50
Issue:
2
ISSN:
1098-2418
Page Range / eLocation ID:
183-200
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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