The Lexicographic Method for the Threshold Cover Problem


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Threshold graphs are a class of graphs that have many equivalent definitions and have applications in integer programming and set packing problems. A graph is said to have a threshold cover of size $k$ if its edges can be covered using $k$ threshold graphs. Chvatal and Hammer, in 1977, defined the threshold dimension $mathrm{th}(G)$ of a graph $G$ to be the least integer $k$ such that $G$ has a threshold cover of size $k$ and observed that $mathrm{th}(G)geqchi(G^*)$, where $G^*$ is a suitably constructed auxiliary graph. Raschle and Simon~[Proceedings of the Twenty-seventh Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, STOC 95, pages 650--661, 1995] proved that $mathrm{th}(G)=chi(G^*)$ whenever $G^*$ is bipartite. We show how the lexicographic method of Hell and Huang can be used to obtain a completely new and, we believe, simpler proof for this result. For the case when $G$ is a split graph, our method yields a proof that is much shorter than the ones known in the literature.

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