Paper detail

The Parameterised Complexity of Counting Connected Subgraphs and Graph Motifs

We introduce a class of parameterised counting problems on graphs, p-#Induced Subgraph With Property(Φ), which generalises a number of problems which have previously been studied. This paper focusses on the case in which Φdefines a family of graphs whose edge-minimal elements all have bounded treewidth; this includes the special case in which Φdescribes the property of being connected. We show that exactly counting the number of connected induced k-vertex subgraphs in an n-vertex graph is #W[1]-hard, but on the other hand there exists an FPTRAS for the problem; more generally, we show that there exists an FPTRAS for p-#Induced Subgraph With Property(Φ) whenever Φis monotone and all the minimal graphs satisfying Φhave bounded treewidth. We then apply these results to a counting version of the Graph Motif problem.