Maximal and maximum transitive relation contained in a given binary relation

05/23/2018

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by   Sourav Chakraborty, et al.

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We study the problem of finding a maximal transitive relation contained in a given binary relation. Given a binary relation of size m defined on a set of size n, we present a polynomial time algorithm that finds a maximal transitive sub-relation in time O(n^2 + nm). We also study the problem of finding a maximum transitive relation contained in a binary relation. This is the problem of computing a maximum transitive subgraph in a given digraph. For the class of directed graphs with the underlying graph being triangle-free, we present a 0.874-approximation algorithm. This is achieved via a simple connection to the problem of maximum directed cut. Further, we give an upper bound for the size of any maximum transitive relation to be m/4 + cm^4/5, where c > 0 and m is the number of edges in the digraph.