This paper was the culmination of my undergraduate research on monopolar graphs with Jing Huang. It shows that a single strategy can be used to solve the monopolar partition problem in all graph classes for which the problem was previously known to be tractable.
The paper generalizes our solution to the monopolar partition problem in line graphs and claw-free graphs.
Solving partition problems with colour-bipartitions. Graphs and Combinatorics 30(2). Ross Churchley and Jing Huang (2014). Polar, monopolar, and unipolar graphs are defined in terms of the existence of certain vertex partitions. Although it is polynomial to determine whether a graph is unipolar and to find whenever possible a unipolar partition, the problems of recognizing polar and monopolar graphs are both NP-complete in general. These problems have recently been studied for chordal, claw-free, and permutation graphs. Polynomial time algorithms have been found for solving the problems for these classes of graphs, with one exception: polarity recognition remains NP-complete in claw-free graphs. In this paper, we connect these problems to edge-coloured homomorphism problems. We show that finding unipolar partitions in general and finding monopolar partitions for certain classes of graphs can be efficiently reduced to a polynomial-time solvable 2-edge-coloured homomorphism problem, which we call the colour-bipartition problem. This approach unifies the currently known results on monopolarity and extends them to new classes of graphs.
This research was completed in the summer of 2010, my last undergraduate research term. I am grateful to NSERC for funding my work with a Undergraduate Student Research Award, and to my supervisor and coauthor Jing Huang.
This paper is the result of the research term I took as an undergraduate in the summer of 2009. It studies the edge versions of the monopolar and polar partition problems, and presents a linear-time solution to both.
This is my favourite paper to come out of my research with Jing Huang at the University of Victoria, and the last one to be published. The main result is that the structure of monopolar partitions in claw-free graphs can be fully understood by looking at small subgraphs and following their direct implications on vertex pairs.