arXiv subjects

Fabrizio Montecchiani

Publications and source records attributed to Fabrizio Montecchiani.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

Strictly-Convex Drawings of $3$-Connected Planar Graphs

Strictly-convex straight-line drawings of $3$-connected planar graphs in small area form a classical research topic in Graph Drawing. Currently, the best-known area bound for such drawings is $O(n^2) \times O(n^2)$, as shown by Bárány and Rote by means of a sophisticated technique based on perturbing (non-strictly) convex drawings. Unfortunately, the hidden constants in such area bound are in the $10^4$ order. We present a new and easy-to-implement technique that yields strictly-convex straight-line planar drawings of $3$-connected planar graphs on an integer grid of size $2(n-1) \times (5n^3-4n^2)$.

cs.CG↗

arXiv2022

Recognizing Map Graphs of Bounded Treewidth

A map graph is a graph admitting a representation in which vertices are nations on a spherical map and edges are shared curve segments or points between nations. We present an explicit fixed-parameter tractable algorithm for recognizing map graphs parameterized by treewidth. The algorithm has time complexity that is linear in the size of the graph and, if the input is a yes-instance, it reports a certificate in the form of a so-called witness. Furthermore, this result is developed within a more general algorithmic framework that allows to test, for any $k$, if the input graph admits a $k$-map (where at most $k$ nations meet at a common point) or a hole-free~$k$-map (where each point of the sphere is covered by at least one nation). We point out that, although bounding the treewidth of the input graph also bounds the size of its largest clique, the latter alone does not seem to be a strong enough structural limitation to obtain an efficient time complexity. In fact, while the largest clique in a $k$-map graph is $\lfloor 3k/2 \rfloor$, the recognition of $k$-map graphs is still open for any fixed $k \ge 5$.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2022

The Influence of Dimensions on the Complexity of Computing Decision Trees

A decision tree recursively splits a feature space $\mathbb{R}^{d}$ and then assigns class labels based on the resulting partition. Decision trees have been part of the basic machine-learning toolkit for decades. A large body of work treats heuristic algorithms to compute a decision tree from training data, usually aiming to minimize in particular the size of the resulting tree. In contrast, little is known about the complexity of the underlying computational problem of computing a minimum-size tree for the given training data. We study this problem with respect to the number $d$ of dimensions of the feature space. We show that it can be solved in $O(n^{2d + 1}d)$ time, but under reasonable complexity-theoretic assumptions it is not possible to achieve $f(d) \cdot n^{o(d / \log d)}$ running time, where $n$ is the number of training examples. The problem is solvable in $(dR)^{O(dR)} \cdot n^{1+o(1)}$ time, if there are exactly two classes and $R$ is an upper bound on the number of tree leaves labeled with the first~class.

cs.CC↗

arXiv2022

On the Parameterized Complexity of the $s$-Club Cluster Edge Deletion Problem

We study the parameterized complexity of the $s$-Club Cluster Edge Deletion problem: Given a graph $G$ and two integers $s \ge 2$ and $k \ge 1$, is it possible to remove at most $k$ edges from $G$ such that each connected component of the resulting graph has diameter at most $s$? This problem is known to be NP-hard already when $s = 2$. We prove that it admits a fixed-parameter tractable algorithm when parameterized by $s$ and the treewidth of the input graph.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2022

Convex Grid Drawings of Planar Graphs with Constant Edge-Vertex Resolution

We continue the study of the area requirement of convex straight-line grid drawings of 3-connected plane graphs, which has been intensively investigated in the last decades. Motivated by applications, such as graph editors, we additionally require the obtained drawings to have bounded edge-vertex resolution, that is, the closest distance between a vertex and any non-incident edge is lower bounded by a constant that does not depend on the size of the graph. We present a drawing algorithm that takes as input a 3-connected plane graph with n vertices and f internal faces and computes a convex straight-line drawing with edge-vertex resolution at least 1/2 on an integer grid of size (n-2+a)x(n-2+a), where a=min{n-3,f}. Our result improves the previously best-known area bound of (3n-7)x(3n-7)/2 by Chrobak, Goodrich and Tamassia.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2022

Book Embeddings of Nonplanar Graphs with Small Faces in Few Pages

An embedding of a graph in a book, called book embedding, consists of a linear ordering of its vertices along the spine of the book and an assignment of its edges to the pages of the book, so that no two edges on the same page cross. The book thickness of a graph is the minimum number of pages over all its book embeddings. For planar graphs, a fundamental result is due to Yannakakis, who proposed an algorithm to compute embeddings of planar graphs in books with four pages. Our main contribution is a technique that generalizes this result to a much wider family of nonplanar graphs, which is characterized by a biconnected skeleton of crossing-free edges whose faces have bounded degree. Notably, this family includes all 1-planar, all optimal 2-planar, and all k-map (with bounded k) graphs as subgraphs. We prove that this family of graphs has bounded book thickness, and as a corollary, we obtain the first constant upper bound for the book thickness of optimal 2-planar and k-map graphs.

cs.CG↗

arXiv2021

On the Upward Book Thickness Problem: Combinatorial and Complexity Results

A long-standing conjecture by Heath, Pemmaraju, and Trenk states that the upward book thickness of outerplanar DAGs is bounded above by a constant. In this paper, we show that the conjecture holds for subfamilies of upward outerplanar graphs, namely those whose underlying graph is an internally-triangulated outerpath or a cactus, and those whose biconnected components are $at$-outerplanar graphs. On the complexity side, it is known that deciding whether a graph has upward book thickness $k$ is NP-hard for any fixed $k \ge 3$. We show that the problem, for any $k \ge 5$, remains NP-hard for graphs whose domination number is $O(k)$, but it is FPT in the vertex cover number.

cs.DM↗

arXiv2021

Optimal-area visibility representations of outer-1-plane graphs

This paper studies optimal-area visibility representations of $n$-vertex outer-1-plane graphs, i.e. graphs with a given embedding where all vertices are on the boundary of the outer face and each edge is crossed at most once. We show that any graph of this family admits an embedding-preserving visibility representation whose area is $O(n^{1.5})$ and prove that this area bound is worst-case optimal. We also show that $O(n^{1.48})$ area can be achieved if we represent the vertices as L-shaped orthogonal polygons or if we do not respect the embedding but still have at most one crossing per edge. We also extend the study to other representation models and, among other results, construct asymptotically optimal $O(n\, pw(G))$ area bar-1-visibility representations, where $pw(G)\in O(\log n)$ is the pathwidth of the outer-1-planar graph $G$.

cs.CG↗

arXiv2021

A User Study on Hybrid Graph Visualizations

Hybrid visualizations mix different metaphors in a single layout of a network. In particular, the popular NodeTrix model, introduced by Henry, Fekete, and McGuffin in 2007, combines node-link diagrams and matrix-based representations to support the analysis of real-world networks that are globally sparse but locally dense. That idea inspired a series of works, proposing variants or alternatives to NodeTrix. We present a user study that compares the classical node-link model and three hybrid visualization models designed to work on the same types of networks. The results of our study provide interesting indications about advantages/drawbacks of the considered models on performing classical tasks of analysis. At the same time, our experiment has some limitations and opens up to further research on the subject.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2021

On Morphing 1-Planar Drawings

Computing a morph between two drawings of a graph is a classical problem in computational geometry and graph drawing. While this problem has been widely studied in the context of planar graphs, very little is known about the existence of topology-preserving morphs for pairs of non-planar graph drawings. We make a step towards this problem by showing that a topology-preserving morph always exists for drawings of a meaningful family of $1$-planar graphs. While our proof is constructive, the vertices may follow trajectories of unbounded complexity.

cs.CG↗

arXiv2021

Generalized LR-drawings of trees

The LR-drawing-method is a method of drawing an ordered rooted binary tree based on drawing one root-to-leaf path on a vertical line and attaching recursively obtained drawings of the subtrees on the left and right. In this paper, we study how to generalize this drawing-method to trees of higher arity. We first prove that (with some careful modifications) the proof of existence of a special root-to-leaf path transfers to trees of higher arity. Then we use such paths to obtain generalized LR-drawings of trees of arbitrary arity.

cs.CG↗

arXiv2021

Grid Drawings of Graphs with Constant Edge-Vertex Resolution

We study the algorithmic problem of computing drawings of graphs in which $(i)$ each vertex is a disk with fixed radius $ρ$, $(ii)$ each edge is a straight-line segment connecting the centers of the two disks representing its end-vertices, $(iii)$ no two disks intersect, and $(iv)$ the distance between an edge segment and the center of a non-incident disk, called \emph{edge-vertex resolution}, is at least $ρ$. We call such drawings \emph{disk-link drawings}. In this paper we focus on the case of constant edge-vertex resolution, namely $ρ=\frac{1}{2}$ (i.e., disks of unit diameter). We prove that star graphs, which trivially admit straight-line drawings in linear area, require quadratic area in any such disk-link drawing. On the positive side, we present constructive techniques that yield improved upper bounds for the area requirements of disk-link drawings for several (planar and nonplanar) graph classes, including bounded bandwidth, complete, and planar graphs. In particular, the presented bounds for complete and planar graphs are asymptotically tight.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2020

VAIM: Visual Analytics for Influence Maximization

In social networks, individuals' decisions are strongly influenced by recommendations from their friends and acquaintances. The influence maximization (IM) problem asks to select a seed set of users that maximizes the influence spread, i.e., the expected number of users influenced through a stochastic diffusion process triggered by the seeds. In this paper, we present VAIM, a visual analytics system that supports users in analyzing the information diffusion process determined by different IM algorithms. By using VAIM one can: (i) simulate the information spread for a given seed set on a large network, (ii) analyze and compare the effectiveness of different seed sets, and (iii) modify the seed sets to improve the corresponding influence spread.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2020

Parameterized Algorithms for Queue Layouts

An $h$-queue layout of a graph $G$ consists of a linear order of its vertices and a partition of its edges into $h$ queues, such that no two independent edges of the same queue nest. The minimum $h$ such that $G$ admits an $h$-queue layout is the queue number of $G$. We present two fixed-parameter tractable algorithms that exploit structural properties of graphs to compute optimal queue layouts. As our first result, we show that deciding whether a graph $G$ has queue number $1$ and computing a corresponding layout is fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized by the treedepth of $G$. Our second result then uses a more restrictive parameter, the vertex cover number, to solve the problem for arbitrary $h$.

cs.CG↗

arXiv2020

Storyline Visualizations with Ubiquitous Actors

Storyline visualizations depict the temporal dynamics of social interactions, as they describe how groups of actors (individuals or organizations) change over time. A common constraint in storyline visualizations is that an actor cannot belong to two different groups at the same time instant. However, this constraint may be too severe in some application scenarios, thus we generalize the model by allowing an actor to simultaneously belong to distinct groups at any point in time. We call this model Storyline with Ubiquitous Actors (SUA). Essential to our model is that an actor is represented as a tree rather than a single line. We describe an algorithmic pipeline to compute storyline visualizations in the SUA model and discuss case studies on publication data.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2020

On Layered Fan-Planar Graph Drawings

In this paper, we study fan-planar drawings that use $h$ layers and are proper, i.e., edges connect adjacent layers. We show that if the embedding of the graph is fixed, then testing the existence of such drawings is fixed-parameter tractable in $h$, via a reduction to a similar result for planar graphs by Dujmović et al. If the embedding is not fixed, then we give partial results for $h=2$: It was already known how to test existence of fan-planar proper 2-layer drawings for 2-connected graphs, and we show here how to test this for trees. Along the way, we exhibit other interesting results for graphs with a fan-planar proper $h$-layer drawings; in particular we bound their pathwidth and show that they have a bar-1-visibility representation.

cs.CG↗

arXiv2019

An Experimental Study of a 1-planarity Testing and Embedding Algorithm

The definition of $1$-planar graphs naturally extends graph planarity, namely a graph is $1$-planar if it can be drawn in the plane with at most one crossing per edge. Unfortunately, while testing graph planarity is solvable in linear time, deciding whether a graph is $1$-planar is NP-complete, even for restricted classes of graphs. Although several polynomial-time algorithms have been described for recognizing specific subfamilies of $1$-planar graphs, no implementations of general algorithms are available to date. We investigate the feasibility of a $1$-planarity testing and embedding algorithm based on a backtracking strategy. While the experiments show that our approach can be successfully applied to graphs with up to 30 vertices, they also suggest the need of more sophisticated techniques to attack larger graphs. Our contribution provides initial indications that may stimulate further research on the design of practical approaches for the $1$-planarity testing problem.

cs.CG↗

arXiv2019

Crossing Numbers of Beyond-Planar Graphs

We study the 1-planar, quasi-planar, and fan-planar crossing number in comparison to the (unrestricted) crossing number of graphs. We prove that there are $n$-vertex 1-planar (quasi-planar, fan-planar) graphs such that any 1-planar (quasi-planar, fan-planar) drawing has $Ω(n)$ crossings, while $O(1)$ crossings suffice in a crossing-minimal drawing without restrictions on local edge crossing patterns.

cs.CG↗