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Viresh Patel

Publications and source records attributed to Viresh Patel.

34 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
arXiv2019

Decomposing tournaments into paths

We consider a generalisation of Kelly's conjecture which is due to Alspach, Mason, and Pullman from 1976. Kelly's conjecture states that every regular tournament has an edge decomposition into Hamilton cycles, and this was proved by Kühn and Osthus for large tournaments. The conjecture of Alspach, Mason, and Pullman asks for the minimum number of paths needed in a path decomposition of a general tournament $T$. There is a natural lower bound for this number in terms of the degree sequence of $T$ and it is conjectured that this bound is correct for tournaments of even order. Almost all cases of the conjecture are open and we prove many of them.

math.CO↗
arXiv2018

Hamilton cycles in sparse robustly expanding digraphs

The notion of robust expansion has played a central role in the solution of several conjectures involving the packing of Hamilton cycles in graphs and directed graphs. These and other results usually rely on the fact that every robustly expanding (di)graph with suitably large minimum degree contains a Hamilton cycle. Previous proofs of this require Szemerédi's Regularity Lemma and so this fact can only be applied to dense, sufficiently large robust expanders. We give a proof that does not use the Regularity Lemma and, indeed, we can apply our result to suitable sparse robustly expanding digraphs.

math.CO↗
arXiv2018

Discrepancy and large dense monochromatic subsets

Erdős and Pach (1983) introduced the natural degree-based generalisations of Ramsey numbers, where instead of seeking large monochromatic cliques in a $2$-edge coloured complete graph, we seek monochromatic subgraphs of high minimum or average degree. Here we expand the study of these so-called quasi-Ramsey numbers in a few ways, in particular, to multiple colours and to uniform hypergraphs. Quasi-Ramsey numbers are known to exhibit a certain unique phase transition and we show that this is also the case across the settings we consider. Our results depend on a density-biased notion of hypergraph discrepancy optimised over sets of bounded size, which may be of independent interest.

math.CO↗
arXiv2017

Deterministic polynomial-time approximation algorithms for partition functions and graph polynomials

In this paper we show a new way of constructing deterministic polynomial-time approximation algorithms for computing complex-valued evaluations of a large class of graph polynomials on bounded degree graphs. In particular, our approach works for the Tutte polynomial and independence polynomial, as well as partition functions of complex-valued spin and edge-coloring models. More specifically, we define a large class of graph polynomials $\mathcal C$ and show that if $p\in \cal C$ and there is a disk $D$ centered at zero in the complex plane such that $p(G)$ does not vanish on $D$ for all bounded degree graphs $G$, then for each $z$ in the interior of $D$ there exists a deterministic polynomial-time approximation algorithm for evaluating $p(G)$ at $z$. This gives an explicit connection between absence of zeros of graph polynomials and the existence of efficient approximation algorithms, allowing us to show new relationships between well-known conjectures. Our work builds on a recent line of work initiated by. Barvinok, which provides a new algorithmic approach besides the existing Markov chain Monte Carlo method and the correlation decay method for these types of problems.

math.CO↗
arXiv2016

On a Ramsey-type problem of Erdős and Pach

In this paper we show that there exists a constant $C>0$ such that for any graph $G$ on $Ck\ln k$ vertices either $G$ or its complement $\bar{G}$ has an induced subgraph on $k$ vertices with minimum degree at least $\frac12(k-1)$. This affirmatively answers a question of Erdős and Pach from 1983.

math.CO↗
arXiv2015

Excluding hooks and their complements

The celebrated Erdos-Hajnal conjecture states that for every $n$-vertex undirected graph $H$ there exists $\eps(H)>0$ such that every graph $G$ that does not contain $H$ as an induced subgraph contains a clique or an independent set of size at least $n^{\eps(H)}$. A weaker version of the conjecture states that the polynomial-size clique/independent set phenomenon occurs if one excludes both $H$ and its complement $H^{\compl}$. We show that the weaker conjecture holds if $H$ is any path with a pendant edge at its third vertex; thus we give a new infinite family of graphs for which the conjecture holds.

math.CO↗
arXiv2015

A precise threshold for quasi-Ramsey numbers

We consider a variation of Ramsey numbers introduced by Erdős and Pach (1983), where instead of seeking complete or independent sets we only seek a $t$-homogeneous set, a vertex subset that induces a subgraph of minimum degree at least $t$ or the complement of such a graph. For any $ν> 0$ and positive integer $k$, we show that any graph $G$ or its complement contains as an induced subgraph some graph $H$ on $\ell \ge k$ vertices with minimum degree at least $\frac12(\ell-1) + ν$ provided that $G$ has at least $k^{Ω(ν^2)}$ vertices. We also show this to be best possible in a sense. This may be viewed as correction to a result claimed in Erdős and Pach (1983). For the above result, we permit $H$ to have order at least $k$. In the harder problem where we insist that $H$ have exactly $k$ vertices, we do not obtain sharp results, although we show a way to translate results of one form of the problem to the other.

math.CO↗
arXiv2015

A domination algorithm for $\{0,1\}$-instances of the travelling salesman problem

We present an approximation algorithm for $\{0,1\}$-instances of the travelling salesman problem which performs well with respect to combinatorial dominance. More precisely, we give a polynomial-time algorithm which has domination ratio $1-n^{-1/29}$. In other words, given a $\{0,1\}$-edge-weighting of the complete graph $K_n$ on $n$ vertices, our algorithm outputs a Hamilton cycle $H^*$ of $K_n$ with the following property: the proportion of Hamilton cycles of $K_n$ whose weight is smaller than that of $H^*$ is at most $n^{-1/29}$. Our analysis is based on a martingale approach. Previously, the best result in this direction was a polynomial-time algorithm with domination ratio $1/2-o(1)$ for arbitrary edge-weights. We also prove a hardness result showing that, if the Exponential Time Hypothesis holds, there exists a constant $C$ such that $n^{-1/29}$ cannot be replaced by $\exp(-(\log n)^C)$ in the result above.

cs.DS↗
arXiv2014

Finding Shortest Paths between Graph Colourings

The $k$-colouring reconfiguration problem asks whether, for a given graph $G$, two proper $k$-colourings $α$ and $β$ of $G$, and a positive integer $\ell$, there exists a sequence of at most $\ell+1$ proper $k$-colourings of $G$ which starts with $α$ and ends with $β$ and where successive colourings in the sequence differ on exactly one vertex of $G$. We give a complete picture of the parameterized complexity of the $k$-colouring reconfiguration problem for each fixed $k$ when parameterized by $\ell$. First we show that the $k$-colouring reconfiguration problem is polynomial-time solvable for $k=3$, settling an open problem of Cereceda, van den Heuvel and Johnson. Then, for all $k \geq 4$, we show that the $k$-colouring reconfiguration problem, when parameterized by $\ell$, is fixed-parameter tractable (addressing a question of Mouawad, Nishimura, Raman, Simjour and Suzuki) but that it has no polynomial kernel unless the polynomial hierarchy collapses.

cs.CC↗
arXiv2014

Parameterized TSP: Beating the Average

In the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP), we are given a complete graph $K_n$ together with an integer weighting $w$ on the edges of $K_n$, and we are asked to find a Hamilton cycle of $K_n$ of minimum weight. Let $h(w)$ denote the average weight of a Hamilton cycle of $K_n$ for the weighting $w$. Vizing (1973) asked whether there is a polynomial-time algorithm which always finds a Hamilton cycle of weight at most $h(w)$. He answered this question in the affirmative and subsequently Rublineckii (1973) and others described several other TSP heuristics satisfying this property. In this paper, we prove a considerable generalisation of Vizing's result: for each fixed $k$, we give an algorithm that decides whether, for any input edge weighting $w$ of $K_n$, there is a Hamilton cycle of $K_n$ of weight at most $h(w)-k$ (and constructs such a cycle if it exists). For $k$ fixed, the running time of the algorithm is polynomial in $n$, where the degree of the polynomial does not depend on $k$ (i.e., the generalised Vizing problem is fixed-parameter tractable with respect to the parameter $k$).

cs.DS↗
arXiv2014

Mixing of the Glauber dynamics for the ferromagnetic Potts model

We present several results on the mixing time of the Glauber dynamics for sampling from the Gibbs distribution in the ferromagnetic Potts model. At a fixed temperature and interaction strength, we study the interplay between the maximum degree ($Δ$) of the underlying graph and the number of colours or spins ($q$) in determining whether the dynamics mixes rapidly or not. We find a lower bound $L$ on the number of colours such that Glauber dynamics is rapidly mixing if at least $L$ colours are used. We give a closely-matching upper bound $U$ on the number of colours such that with probability that tends to 1, the Glauber dynamics mixes slowly on random $Δ$-regular graphs when at most $U$ colours are used. We show that our bounds can be improved if we restrict attention to certain types of graphs of maximum degree $Δ$, e.g. toroidal grids for $Δ= 4$.

cs.DM↗
arXiv2013

Poset limits can be totally ordered

S.Janson [Poset limits and exchangeable random posets, Combinatorica 31 (2011), 529--563] defined limits of finite posets in parallel to the emerging theory of limits of dense graphs. We prove that each poset limit can be represented as a kernel on the unit interval with the standard order, thus answering an open question of Janson. We provide two proofs: real-analytic and combinatorial. The combinatorial proof is based on a Szemeredi-type Regularity Lemma for posets which may be of independent interest. Also, as a by-product of the analytic proof, we show that every atomless ordered probability space admits a measure-preserving and almost order-preserving map to the unit interval.

math.CO↗
arXiv2013

Proof of a conjecture of Thomassen on Hamilton cycles in highly connected tournaments

A conjecture of Thomassen from 1982 states that for every k there is an f(k) so that every strongly f(k)-connected tournament contains k edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles. A classical theorem of Camion, that every strongly connected tournament contains a Hamilton cycle, implies that f(1)=1. So far, even the existence of f(2) was open. In this paper, we prove Thomassen's conjecture by showing that f(k)=O(k^2*log^2(k)). This is best possible up to the logarithmic factor. As a tool, we show that every strongly 10^4*k*log(k)-connected tournament is k-linked (which improves a previous exponential bound). The proof of the latter is based on a fundamental result of Ajtai, Komlós and Szemerédi on asymptotically optimal sorting networks.

math.CO↗
arXiv2012

Tight inequalities among set hitting times in Markov chains

Given an irreducible discrete-time Markov chain on a finite state space, we consider the largest expected hitting time $T(α)$ of a set of stationary measure at least $α$ for $α\in(0,1)$. We obtain tight inequalities among the values of $T(α)$ for different choices of $α$. One consequence is that $T(α) \le T(1/2)/α$ for all $α< 1/2$. As a corollary we have that, if the chain is lazy in a certain sense as well as reversible, then $T(1/2)$ is equivalent to the chain's mixing time, answering a question of Peres. We furthermore demonstrate that the inequalities we establish give an almost everywhere pointwise limiting characterisation of possible hitting time functions $T(α)$ over the domain $α\in(0,1/2]$.

math.PR↗