Computing Shrub-Depth Decompositions

Shrub-depth is a width measure of graphs which, roughly speaking, corresponds to the smallest depth of a tree into which a graph can be encoded. It can be thought of as a low-depth variant of clique-width (or rank-width), similarly as treedepth is a low-depth variant of treewidth. We present an fpt algorithm for computing decompositions of graphs of bounded shrub-depth. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first algorithm which computes the decomposition directly, without use of rank-width decompositions and FO or MSO logic