On Cycle Transversals and Their Connected Variants in the Absence of a Small Linear Forest

Abstract

AbstractA graph is H-free if it contains no induced subgraph isomorphic to H. We prove new complexity results for the two classical cycle transversal problems Feedback Vertex Set and Odd Cycle Transversal by showing that they can be solved in polynomial time on $$(sP_1+ P_3)$$ ( s P 1 + P 3 ) -free graphs for every integer $$s\ge 1$$ s ≥ 1 . We show the same result for the variants Connected Feedback Vertex Set and Connected Odd Cycle Transversal. We also prove that the latter two problems are polynomial-time solvable on cographs; this was already known for Feedback Vertex Set and Odd Cycle Transversal. We complement these results by proving that Odd Cycle Transversal and Connected Odd Cycle Transversal are -complete on $$(P_2+ P_5,P_6)$$ ( P 2 + P 5 , P 6 ) -free graphs.