Efficiently Recognizing the P ₄-Structure of Trees and of Bipartite Graphs Without Short Cycles

Abstract.

A 4-uniform hypergraph represents the P ₄-structure of a graph G if its hyperedges are the vertex sets of the P ₄'s in G. By using the weighted 2-section graph of the hypergraph we propose a simple efficient algorithm to decide whether a given 4-uniform hypergraph represents the P ₄-structure of a bipartite graph without 4-cycle and 6-cycle. For trees, our algorithm is different from that given by G. Ding and has a better running time namely O(n ²) where n is the number of vertices.