Solving the undirected feedback vertex set problem by local search
This addresses a challenging NP-complete graph problem for researchers in combinatorial optimization, but it is incremental as it builds on existing local search methods with a new constraint formulation.
The paper tackled the undirected feedback vertex set (FVS) problem, a computationally hard optimization task, by developing a simulated annealing local search algorithm that reformulates global cycle constraints into local vertex constraints, and found it performs comparably to belief propagation-guided decimation on large random graph instances.
An undirected graph consists of a set of vertices and a set of undirected edges between vertices. Such a graph may contain an abundant number of cycles, then a feedback vertex set (FVS) is a set of vertices intersecting with each of these cycles. Constructing a FVS of cardinality approaching the global minimum value is a optimization problem in the nondeterministic polynomial-complete complexity class, therefore it might be extremely difficult for some large graph instances. In this paper we develop a simulated annealing local search algorithm for the undirected FVS problem. By defining an order for the vertices outside the FVS, we replace the global cycle constraints by a set of local vertex constraints on this order. Under these local constraints the cardinality of the focal FVS is then gradually reduced by the simulated annealing dynamical process. We test this heuristic algorithm on large instances of Erödos-Renyi random graph and regular random graph, and find that this algorithm is comparable in performance to the belief propagation-guided decimation algorithm.