Local treewidth of random and noisy graphs with applications to stopping contagion in networks

Abstract: We study the notion of local treewidth in sparse random graphs: the maximum treewidth over all $k$-vertex subgraphs of an $n$-vertex graph. When $k$ is not too large, we give nearly tight bounds for this local treewidth parameter; we also derive tight bounds for the local treewidth of noisy trees, trees where every non-edge is added independently with small probability. We apply our upper bounds on the local treewidth to obtain fixed parameter tractable algorithms (on random graphs and noisy trees) for edge-removal problems centered around containing a contagious process evolving over a network. In these problems, our main parameter of study is $k$, the number of initially ``infected'' vertices in the network. For the random graph models we consider and a certain range of parameters the running time of our algorithms on $n$-vertex graphs is $2^{o(k)}\textrm{poly}(n)$, improving upon the $2^{\Omega(k)}\textrm{poly}(n)$ performance of the best-known algorithms designed for worst-case instances of these edge deletion problems.