Local treewidth of random and noisy graphs with applications to stopping contagion in networks
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We study the notion of local treewidth in sparse random graphs: the maximum treewidth over all k-vertex subgraphs of an n-vertex graph. When k is not too large, we give nearly tight bounds for this local treewidth parameter; we also derive tight bounds for the local treewidth of noisy trees, trees where every non-edge is added independently with small probability. We apply our upper bounds on the local treewidth to obtain fixed parameter tractable algorithms (on random graphs and noisy trees) for edge-removal problems centered around containing a contagious process evolving over a network. In these problems, our main parameter of study is k, the number of initially “infected” vertices in the network. For the random graph models we consider and a certain range of parameters the running time of our algorithms on n-vertex graphs is 2^o(k)poly(n), improving upon the 2^Ω(k)poly(n) performance of the best-known algorithms designed for worst-case instances of these edge deletion problems.
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