Date: September 20, 2018

Speaker: Sumedha Uniyal (Aalto University)

Meeting place: Konemiehentie 2, Room T4 (Otaniemi)

Abstract: A cactus graph is a graph in which any two cycles are edge-disjoint.We present a constructive proof of the fact that any plane graph G contains a cactus subgraph C where C contains at least a 1/6 fraction of the triangular faces of G. We also show that this ratio cannot be improved by showing a tight lower bound.Together with an algorithm for linear matroid parity, our bound implies two approximation algorithms for computing “dense planar structures” inside any graph: (i) A 1/6 approximation algorithm for, given any graph G, finding a planar subgraph with a maximum number of triangular faces; this improves upon the previous 1/11-approximation; (ii) An alternate (and arguably more illustrative) proof of the 4/9-approximation algorithm for finding a planar subgraph with a maximum number of edges. Our bound is obtained by analyzing a natural local search strategy and heavily exploiting the exchange arguments. Therefore, this suggests the power of local search in handling problems of this kind.