An Improvement of Reed’s Treewidth Approximation

We present a new approximation algorithm for the treewidth problem which constructs a corresponding tree decomposition as well. Our algorithm is a faster variation of Reed’s classical algorithm. For the benefit of the reader, and to be able to compare these two algorithms, we start with a detailed time analysis for Reed’s algorithm. We fill in many details that have been omitted in Reed’s paper. Computing tree decompositions parameterized by the treewidth k is fixed parameter tractable (FPT), meaning that there are algorithms running in time O(f(k)g(n)) where f is a computable function, g(n) is polynomial in n, and n is the number of vertices. An analysis of Reed’s algorithm shows \(f(k) = 2^{O(k \log k)}\) and \(g(n) = n \log n\) for a 5-approximation. Reed simply claims time \(O(n \log n)\) for bounded k for his constant factor approximation algorithm, but the bound of \(2^{\varOmega (k \log k)} n \log n\) is well known. From a practical point of view, we notice that the time of Reed’s algorithm also contains a term of \(O(k^2 2^{24k} n \log n)\), which for small k is much worse than the asymptotically leading term of \(2^{O(k \log k)} n \log n\). We analyze f(k) more precisely, because the purpose of this paper is to improve the running times for all reasonably small values of k.