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Coloring dense graphs via VC-dimension

The Vapnik-Červonenkis dimension is a complexity measure of set-systems, or hypergraphs. Its application to graphs is usually done by considering the sets of neighborhoods of the vertices (cf. Alon et al. (2006) and Chepoi, Estellon, and Vaxes (2007)), hence providing a set-system. But the graph structure is lost in the process. The aim of this paper is to introduce the notion of paired VC-dimension, a generalization of VC-dimension to set-systems endowed with a graph structure, hence a collection of pairs of subsets. The classical VC-theory is generally used in combinatorics to bound the transversality of a hypergraph in terms of its fractional transversality and its VC-dimension. Similarly, we bound the chromatic number in terms of fractional transversality and paired VC-dimension. This approach turns out to be very useful for a class of problems raised by Erdős and Simonovits (1973) asking for H-free graphs with minimum degree at least cn and arbitrarily high chromatic number, where H is a fixed graph and c a positive constant. We show how the usual VC-dimension gives a short proof of the fact that triangle-free graphs with minimum degree at least n/3 have bounded chromatic number, where $n$ is the number of vertices. Using paired VC-dimension, we prove that if the chromatic number of $H$-free graphs with minimum degree at least cn is unbounded for some positive c, then it is unbounded for all c<1/3. In other words, one can find H-free graphs with unbounded chromatic number and minimum degree arbitrarily close to n/3. These H-free graphs are derived from a construction of Hajnal. The large chromatic number follows from the Borsuk-Ulam Theorem.