General and fractional hypertree decompositions: hard and easy cases

Conference item

Hypertree decompositions, as well as the more powerful generalized hypertree decompositions (GHDs), and the yet more general fractional hypertree decompositions (FHD) are hypergraph decomposition methods successfully used for answering conjunctive queries and for solving constraint satisfaction problems. Every hypergraph H has a width relative to each of these methods: its hypertree width hw(H), its generalized hypertree width ghw(H), and its fractional hypertree width fhw(H), respectively. It is known that hw(H) ≤ k can be checked in polynomial time for fixed k, while checking ghw(H) ≤ k is NP-complete for k ≥ 3. The complexity of checking fhw(H) ≤ k for a fixed k has been open for over a decade. We settle this open problem by showing that checking fhw(H) ≤ k is NP-complete, even for k = 2. The same construction allows us to prove also the NP-completeness of checking ghw(H) ≤ k for k = 2. After that, we identify meaningful restrictions for which checking for bounded ghw or fhw becomes tractable.

Authors: Fischl, W; Gottlob, G; Pichler, R

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery
• Host title: PODS’18: 35th ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGAI Symposium on Principles of Database Systems, June 10–15, 2018, Houston, TX, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 16 pages.
• Journal: 37th ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGAI Symposium on Principles of Database Systems, PODS 2018
• Publication date: 2018-05-27
• Acceptance date: 2018-03-23
• DOI: 10.1145/3196959.3196962
• ISBN: 9781450347068