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Combinatorics and Algorithms for Quasi-Chain Graphs
The class of quasi-chain graphs is an extension of the well-studied class of chain
graphs. This latter class enjoys many nice and important properties, such as bounded
clique-width, implicit representation, well-quasi-ordering by induced subgraphs, etc.
The class of quasi-chain graphs is substantially more complex. In particular, this class
is not well-quasi-ordered by induced subgraphs, and the clique-width is not bounded
in it. In the present paper, we show that the universe of quasi-chain graphs is at least as
complex as the universe of permutations by establishing a bijection between the class
of all permutations and a subclass of quasi-chain graphs.This implies, in particular, that
the induced subgraph isomorphism problem is NP-complete for quasi-chain graphs.
On the other hand, we propose a decomposition theorem for quasi-chain graphs that
implies an implicit representation for graphs in this class and efficient solutions for
some algorithmic problems that are generally intractable.