Blocking independent sets for H-free graphs via edge contractions and vertex deletions.

Let d and k be two given integers, and let G be a graph. Can we reduce the independence number of G by at least d via at most k graph operations from some fixed set S? This problem belongs to a class of so-called blocker problems. It is known to be co-NP-hard even if S consists of either an edge contraction or a vertex deletion. We further investigate its computational complexity under these two settings: we give a sufficient condition on a graph class for the vertex deletion variant to be co-NP-hard even if d=k=1d=k=1 ; in addition we prove that the vertex deletion variant is co-NP-hard for triangle-free graphs even if d=k=1d=k=1 ; we prove that the edge contraction variant is NP-hard for bipartite graphs but linear-time solvable for trees. By combining our new results with known ones we are able to give full complexity classifications for both variants restricted to H-free graphs. D. Paulusma received support from EPSRC (EP/K025090/1)