Spanning trees with many or few colors in edge-colored graphs
Hajo J. Broersma, Xue Liang Li · Discussiones Mathematicae Graph Theory · 1997
Given a graph G = (V,E) and a (not necessarily proper) edge-coloring of G, we consider the complexity of finding a spanning tree of G with as many different colors as possible, and of finding one with as few different colors as possible. We show that the first problem is equivalent to finding a common independent set of maximum cardinality in two matroids, implying that there is a polynomial algorithm. We use the minimum dominating set problem to show that the second problem is NP-hard.