Large induced subgraphs via triangulations and CMSO

Abstract: We obtain an algorithmic meta-theorem for the following optimization problem. Let \phi\ be a Counting Monadic Second Order Logic (CMSO) formula and t be an integer. For a given graph G, the task is to maximize |X| subject to the following: there is a set of vertices F of G, containing X, such that the subgraph G[F] induced by F is of treewidth at most t, and structure (G[F],X) models \phi. Some special cases of this optimization problem are the following generic examples. Each of these cases contains various problems as a special subcase: 1) "Maximum induced subgraph with at most l copies of cycles of length 0 modulo m", where for fixed nonnegative integers m and l, the task is to find a maximum induced subgraph of a given graph with at most l vertex-disjoint cycles of length 0 modulo m. 2) "Minimum \Gamma-deletion", where for a fixed finite set of graphs \Gamma\ containing a planar graph, the task is to find a maximum induced subgraph of a given graph containing no graph from \Gamma\ as a minor. 3) "Independent \Pi-packing", where for a fixed finite set of connected graphs \Pi, the task is to find an induced subgraph G[F] of a given graph G with the maximum number of connected components, such that each connected component of G[F] is isomorphic to some graph from \Pi. We give an algorithm solving the optimization problem on an n-vertex graph G in time O(#pmc n^{t+4} f(t,\phi)), where #pmc is the number of all potential maximal cliques in G and f is a function depending of t and \phi\ only. We also show how a similar running time can be obtained for the weighted version of the problem. Pipelined with known bounds on the number of potential maximal cliques, we deduce that our optimization problem can be solved in time O(1.7347^n) for arbitrary graphs, and in polynomial time for graph classes with polynomial number of minimal separators.