On the editing distance of graphs

Abstract

An edge-operation on a graph $G$ is defined to be either the deletion of an existing edge or the addition of a nonexisting edge. Given a family of graphs $\mathcal{G}$, the editing distance from $G$ to $\mathcal{G}$ is the smallest number of edge-operations needed to modify $G$ into a graph from $\mathcal{G}$. In this paper, we fix a graph $H$ and consider $\mathrm{Forb}(n,H)$, the set of all graphs on $n$ vertices that have no induced copy of $H$. We provide bounds for the maximum over all $n$-vertex graphs $G$ of the editing distance from $G$ to $\mathrm{Forb}(n,H)$, using an invariant we call the {\it binary chromatic number} of the graph $H$. We give asymptotically tight bounds for that distance when $H$ is self-complementary and exact results for several small graphs $H$.