Decremental Sensitivity Oracles for Covering and Packing Minors

In this paper, we present the first decremental fixed-parameter sensitivity oracles for a number of basic covering and packing problems on graphs. In particular, we obtain the first decremental sensitivity oracles for Vertex Planarization (delete k vertices to make the graph planar) and Cycle Packing (pack k vertex-disjoint cycles in the given graph). That is, we give a sensitivity oracle that preprocesses the given graph in time f(k, ℓ)nO(1) such that, when given a set of ℓ edge deletions, the data structure decides in time f(k, ℓ) whether the updated graph is a positive instance of the problem. These results are obtained as a corollary of our central result, which is the first decremental sensitivity oracle for Topological Minor Deletion (cover all topological minors in the input graph that belong to a specified set, using k vertices). Though our methodology closely follows the literature, we are able to produce the first explicit bounds on the preprocessing and query times for several problems. We also initiate the study of fixed-parameter sensitivity oracles with so-called structural parameterizations and give sufficient conditions for the existence of fixed-parameter sensitivity oracles where the parameter is just the treewidth of the graph. In contrast, all existing literature on this topic and the aforementioned results in this paper assume a bound on the solution size (a weaker parameter than treewidth for many problems). As corollaries, we obtain decremental sensitivity oracles for well-studied problems such as Vertex Cover and Dominating Set when only the treewidth of the input graph is bounded. A feature of our methodology behind these results is that we are able to obtain query times independent of treewidth.