Classes of graphs without star forests and related graphs

Abstract: This work provides a structural characterisation of hereditary graph classes that do not contain a star forest, several graphs obtained from star forests by subset complementation, a union of cliques, and the complement of a union of cliques as induced subgraphs. This provides, for instance, structural results for graph classes not containing a matching and several complements of a matching. In terms of the speed of hereditary graph classes, our results imply that all such classes have at most factorial speed of growth.