Homology Localization Through the Looking-Glass of Parameterized Complexity Theory
Finding a cycle of lowest weight that represents a homology class in a simplicial complex is known as homology localization (HL). Here we address this NP-complete problem using parameterized complexity theory. We show that it is W[1]-hard to approximate the HL problem when it is parameterized by solution size. We have also designed and implemented two algorithms based on treewidth solving the HL problem in FPT-time. Both algorithms are ETH-tight but our results shows that one outperforms the other in practice.
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