Parameterized Complexity of Graph Burning
share
Graph Burning asks, given a graph G = (V,E) and an integer k, whether there exists (b_0,…,b_k-1) ∈ V^k such that every vertex in G has distance at most i from some b_i. This problem is known to be NP-complete even on connected caterpillars of maximum degree 3. We study the parameterized complexity of this problem and answer all questions arose by Kare and Reddy [IWOCA 2019] about parameterized complexity of the problem. We show that the problem is W[2]-complete parameterized by k and that it does no admit a polynomial kernel parameterized by vertex cover number unless NP⊆coNP/poly. We also show that the problem is fixed-parameter tractable parameterized by clique-width plus the maximum diameter among all connected components. This implies the fixed-parameter tractability parameterized by modular-width, by treedepth, and by distance to cographs. Although the parameterization by distance to split graphs cannot be handled with the clique-width argument, we show that this is also tractable by a reduction to a generalized problem with a smaller solution size.
READ FULL TEXT