Greed is Good for Deterministic Scale-Free Networks

Large real-world networks typically follow a power-law degree distribution. To study such networks, numerous random graph models have been proposed. However, real-world networks are not drawn at random. Therefore, Brach et al. (27th symposium on discrete algorithms (SODA), pp 1306–1325, 2016) introduced two natural deterministic conditions: (1) a power-law upper bound on the degree distribution (PLB-U) and (2) power-law neighborhoods, that is, the degree distribution of neighbors of each vertex is also upper bounded by a power law (PLB-N). They showed that many real-world networks satisfy both properties and exploit them to design faster algorithms for a number of classical graph problems. We complement their work by showing that some well-studied random graph models exhibit both of the mentioned PLB properties. PLB-U and PLB-N hold with high probability for Chung–Lu Random Graphs and Geometric Inhomogeneous Random Graphs and almost surely for Hyperbolic Random Graphs. As a consequence, all results of Brach et al. also hold with high probability or almost surely for those random graph classes. In the second part we study three classical $$\textsf {NP}$$ NP -hard optimization problems on PLB networks. It is known that on general graphs with maximum degree  $$\Delta$$ Δ , a greedy algorithm, which chooses nodes in the order of their degree, only achieves a $$\Omega (\ln \Delta )$$ Ω ( ln Δ ) -approximation for Minimum Vertex Cover and Minimum Dominating Set , and a $$\Omega (\Delta )$$ Ω ( Δ ) -approximation for Maximum Independent Set . We prove that the PLB-U property with $$\beta >2$$ β > 2 suffices for the greedy approach to achieve a constant-factor approximation for all three problems. We also show that these problems are APX -hard even if PLB-U, PLB-N, and an additional power-law lower bound on the degree distribution hold. Hence, a PTAS cannot be expected unless P = NP . Furthermore, we prove that all three problems are in MAX SNP if the PLB-U property holds.