On the Complexity of Claw-Free Vertex Splitting

Faisal N. Abu-Khzam; Sergio Thoumi

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arXiv · 2506.06044

On the Complexity of Claw-Free Vertex Splitting

Faisal N. Abu-Khzam·Sergio Thoumi

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Abstract

Vertex splitting consists of taking a vertex $v$ in a graph and replacing it with two non-adjacent vertices whose combined neighborhoods is the neighborhood of $v$. The split is said to be exclusive when these neighborhoods are disjoint. In the Claw-Free (Exclusive) Vertex Splitting problem, we are given a graph $G$ and an integer $k$, and we are asked if we can perform at most $k$ (exclusive) vertex splits to obtain a claw-free graph. We consider the complexity of Claw-Free Exclusive Vertex Splitting and prove it to be NP-complete in general, while admitting a polynomial-time algorithm when the input graph has maximum degree 4. This result settles an open problem posed in [Firbas \& Sorge, ISAAC 2024]. We also show that our results can be generalized to $K_{1,c}$-Free Vertex Splitting for all $c \geq 3$.

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BibTeX RIS

Faisal N. Abu-Khzam, Sergio Thoumi. 2025-06-06. On the Complexity of Claw-Free Vertex Splitting. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06044

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