License: 
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY 3.0)
When quoting this document, please refer to the following
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.MFCS.2018.49
URN: urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-96315
URL: http://dagstuhl.sunsite.rwth-aachen.de/volltexte/2018/9631/
Göbel, Andreas ;
Lagodzinski, J. A. Gregor ;
Seidel, Karen
Counting Homomorphisms to Trees Modulo a Prime
Abstract
Many important graph theoretic notions can be encoded as counting graph homomorphism problems, such as partition functions in statistical physics, in particular independent sets and colourings. In this article we study the complexity of #_pHomsToH, the problem of counting graph homomorphisms from an input graph to a graph H modulo a prime number p. Dyer and Greenhill proved a dichotomy stating that the tractability of non-modular counting graph homomorphisms depends on the structure of the target graph. Many intractable cases in non-modular counting become tractable in modular counting due to the common phenomenon of cancellation. In subsequent studies on counting modulo 2, however, the influence of the structure of H on the tractability was shown to persist, which yields similar dichotomies.
Our main result states that for every tree H and every prime p the problem #_pHomsToH is either polynomial time computable or #_pP-complete. This relates to the conjecture of Faben and Jerrum stating that this dichotomy holds for every graph H when counting modulo 2. In contrast to previous results on modular counting, the tractable cases of #_pHomsToH are essentially the same for all values of the modulo when H is a tree. To prove this result, we study the structural properties of a homomorphism. As an important interim result, our study yields a dichotomy for the problem of counting weighted independent sets in a bipartite graph modulo some prime p. These results are the first suggesting that such dichotomies hold not only for the one-bit functions of the modulo 2 case but also for the modular counting functions of all primes p.
BibTeX - Entry
@InProceedings{gbel_et_al:LIPIcs:2018:9631,
author = {Andreas G{\"o}bel and J. A. Gregor Lagodzinski and Karen Seidel},
title = {{Counting Homomorphisms to Trees Modulo a Prime}},
booktitle = {43rd International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS 2018)},
pages = {49:1--49:13},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-086-6},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2018},
volume = {117},
editor = {Igor Potapov and Paul Spirakis and James Worrell},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2018/9631},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-96315},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.MFCS.2018.49},
annote = {Keywords: Algorithms, Theory, Graph Homomorphisms, Counting Modulo a Prime, Complexity Dichotomy}
}
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Keywords: |
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Algorithms, Theory, Graph Homomorphisms, Counting Modulo a Prime, Complexity Dichotomy |
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Collection: |
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43rd International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS 2018) |
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Issue Date: |
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2018 |
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Date of publication: |
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27.08.2018 |
