Leafy spanning k-forests
Cristina G. Fernandes, Carla Négri Lintzmayer, Mário César San Felice · 2021
We denote by Maximum Leaf Spanning k-Forest the problem of, given a positive integer k and a graph G with at most k components, finding a spanning forest in G with at most k components and the maximum number of leaves. A leaf in a forest is defined as a vertex of degree at most one. The case k = 1 for connected graphs is known to be NP-hard, and is well studied in the literature, with the best approximation algorithm proposed more than 20 years ago by Solis-Oba. The best known approximation algorithm for Maximum Leaf Spanning k-Forest with a slightly different leaf definition is a 3-approximation based on an approach by Lu and Ravi for the k = 1 case. We extend the algorithm of Solis-Oba to achieve a 2-approximation for Maximum Leaf Spanning k-Forest.