A Note on the Inapproximability of Induced Disjoint Paths

Abstract: We study the inapproximability of the induced disjoint paths problem on an arbitrary $n$-node $m$-edge undirected graph, which is to connect the maximum number of the $k$ source-sink pairs given in the graph via induced disjoint paths. It is known that the problem is NP-hard to approximate within $m^{{1\over 2}-\varepsilon}$ for a general $k$ and any $\varepsilon>0$. In this paper, we prove that the problem is NP-hard to approximate within $n^{1-\varepsilon}$ for a general $k$ and any $\varepsilon>0$ by giving a simple reduction from the independent set problem.