Hitting Diamonds and Growing Cacti
arXiv:0911.4366 · doi:10.1007/978-3-642-13036-6_15
Abstract
We consider the following NP-hard problem: in a weighted graph, find a minimum cost set of vertices whose removal leaves a graph in which no two cycles share an edge. We obtain a constant-factor approximation algorithm, based on the primal-dual method. Moreover, we show that the integrality gap of the natural LP relaxation of the problem is Î(\log n), where n denotes the number of vertices in the graph.
v2: several minor changes.