Counting independent sets in strongly orderable graphs

01/06/2021

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by   Marc Heinrich, et al.

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We consider the problem of devising algorithms to count exactly the number of independent sets of a graph G . We show that there is a polynomial time algorithm for this problem when G is restricted to the class of strongly orderable graphs, a superclass of chordal bipartite graphs. We also show that such an algorithm exists for graphs of bounded clique-width. Our results extends to a more general setting of counting independent sets in a weighted graph and can be used to count the number of independent sets of any given size k .