Incompressibility of H-Free Edge Modification Problems: Towards a Dichotomy

Given a graph G and an integer k, the H-free Edge Editing problem is to find whether there exist at most k pairs of vertices in G such that changing the adjacency of the pairs in G results in a graph without any induced copy of H. The existence of polynomial kernels for H-free Edge Editing (that is, whether it is possible to reduce the size of the instance to k^O(1) in polynomial time) received significant attention in the parameterized complexity literature. Nontrivial polynomial kernels are known to exist for some graphs H with at most 4 vertices (e.g., path on 3 or 4 vertices, diamond, paw), but starting from 5 vertices, polynomial kernels are known only if H is either complete or empty. This suggests the conjecture that there is no other H with at least 5 vertices were H-free Edge Editing admits a polynomial kernel. Towards this goal, we obtain a set ℋ of nine 5-vertex graphs such that if for every H ∈ ℋ, H-free Edge Editing is incompressible and the complexity assumption NP ⊈ coNP/poly holds, then H-free Edge Editing is incompressible for every graph H with at least five vertices that is neither complete nor empty. That is, proving incompressibility for these nine graphs would give a complete classification of the kernelization complexity of H-free Edge Editing for every H with at least 5 vertices. We obtain similar result also for H-free Edge Deletion. Here the picture is more complicated due to the existence of another infinite family of graphs H where the problem is trivial (graphs with exactly one edge). We obtain a larger set ℋ of nineteen graphs whose incompressibility would give a complete classification of the kernelization complexity of H-free Edge Deletion for every graph H with at least 5 vertices. Analogous results follow also for the H-free Edge Completion problem by simple complementation.