Clique-width: on the price of generality
Fedor V. Fomin, Petr A. Golovach, Daniel Lokshtanov, Saket Saurabh · 2009
Many hard problems can be solved efficiently when the input is restricted to graphs of bounded treewidth. By the celebrated result of Courcelle, every decision problem expressible in monadic second order logic is fixed parameter tractable when parameterized by the treewidth of the input graph. Moreover, for every fixed k ≥ 0, such problems can be solved in linear time on graphs of treewidth at most k. In particular, this implies that basic problems like Dominating Set, Graph Coloring, Clique, and Hamiltonian Cycle are solvable in linear time on graphs of bounded treewidth. A significant amount of research in graph algorithms has been devoted to extending this result to larger classes of graphs. It was shown that some of the algorithmic meta-theorems for treewidth can be carried over to graphs of bounded clique-width. Courcelle, Makowsky, and Rotics proved that the analogue of Courcelle’s result holds for graphs of bounded cliquewidth when the logical formulas do not use edge set quantifications. Despite of its generality, this does not resolve the parameterized complexity of many basic problems concerning edge subsets (like Edge Dominating Set), vertex partitioning (like Graph Coloring), or