Abstract
The problems studied in this paper originate from Graph Motif, a problem introduced in 2006 in the context of biological networks. Informally speaking, it consists in deciding if a multiset of colors occurs in a connected subgraph of a vertex-colored graph. Due to the high rate of noise in the biological data, more flexible definitions of the problem have been outlined. We present in this paper two inapproximability results for two different optimization variants of Graph Motif: one where the size of the solution is maximized, the other when the number of substitutions of colors to obtain the motif from the solution is minimized. We also study a decision version of Graph Motif where the connectivity constraint is replaced by the well known notion of graph modularity. While the problem remains N P-complete, it allows algorithms in F P T for biologically relevant parameterizations.
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An extended abstract of this paper appeared in the proceedings of the 7th International Computer Science Symposium in Russia (CSR 2012), LNCS 7353, pp. 278-289.
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Rizzi, R., Sikora, F. Some Results on More Flexible Versions of Graph Motif. Theory Comput Syst 56, 612–629 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00224-014-9564-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00224-014-9564-6