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I'm writing a program which uses an undirected graph to represent certain social connections, and I'm trying to check whether or not it's contains a specific induced subgraph.

Given a dense an undirected graph $G=(V,E)$ where I have a large amount of vertices and $|E|\in O(|V|^2)$ many edges, I would like to check whether it contains a cross/parallel (unrelated) edge pair. These are $2$ edges $\left(v_1, v_2\right)$ and $\left(v_3, v_4\right)$ such that for any $i<j$ (excluding $i=1,j=2$ and $i=3,j=4$) there is no edge $\left( v_i , v_j \right)$. In other words, the only $2$ edges are $\left(v_1, v_2\right)$ and $\left(v_3, v_4\right)$.

This is a subroutine that is expected to be called frequently (on different graphs, so I can't use partial results from previous iterations), so I'm trying to save valuable runtime.

The initial naive approach is $|E|^2 = |V|^4$ by having's $O(1)$ boolean conditions to be checked for any pair of edges, but this is highly not effective.

I have been thinking to look at $\overline{G}$, and check to see if it is a chordal graph and also if it contains $C_4$. I know that a LEX-BFS approach can verify in $O(|V|+|E|)$ if $\overline{G}$ is chordal or not (see Rose, Lueker & Tarjan (1976)), and that in $O(|V|^2)$ it is possible to check if $\overline{G}$ contains $C_4$ by a variant of BFS.

However, I am not sure if this approach if there is a more efficient approach. It seems that too much time is "wasted" upon checking if $C_4$ exists, and that's why I'm looking for an alternative way.

Clarifications:

  • I'm looking for a subset of $4$ vertices $\left\{ v_1 ,\ldots , v_4 \right\}$ such that $\left(v_1,v_2\right),\left(v_3,v_4\right) \in E$ and these are the only edges induces by these vertices.
  • In other words, for any other $i,j$ there is no edge $\left(v_i , v_j \right)\notin E$.
  • My usecase for this graph is dense, so may assume $|E| \in O(|V|^2)$.
  • The graph itself is persumed to have many vertices, so I'm trying to reduce the runtime somewhere to linear or $|V| \log |V|$ or $|V|^2$ but $|V|^3$ can take too much considering the amount of vertices I have (Because this is a subroutine that would be invoked many times).
Benicio Agüero
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1 Answers1

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This 2015 paper by Williams et al. considers induced subgraphs and shows how to find $C_4$ and co-$C_4$ in a graph $G$ time $O(\min\{n^\omega, m^{\frac{4\omega-1}{2\omega+1}}\})$, where $n$, $m$ are the number of vertices and edges of $G$, respectively, and $\omega$ is the matrix-multiplication exponent.

Since $\omega < 2.372$, this is a subcubic algorithm.

Steven
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