On Feasible Sets of Mixed Hypergraphs

Abstract

A mixed hypergraph $H$ is a triple $(V,{\cal C},{\cal D})$ where $V$ is the vertex set and ${\cal C}$ and ${\cal D}$ are families of subsets of $V$, called ${\cal C}$-edges and ${\cal D}$-edges. A vertex coloring of $H$ is proper if each ${\cal C}$-edge contains two vertices with the same color and each ${\cal D}$-edge contains two vertices with different colors. The spectrum of $H$ is a vector $(r_1,\ldots,r_m)$ such that there exist exactly $r_i$ different colorings using exactly $i$ colors, $r_m\ge 1$ and there is no coloring using more than $m$ colors. The feasible set of $H$ is the set of all $i$'s such that $r_i\ne 0$.

We construct a mixed hypergraph with $O(\sum_i\log r_i)$ vertices whose spectrum is equal to $(r_1,\ldots,r_m)$ for each vector of non-negative integers with $r_1=0$. We further prove that for any fixed finite sets of positive integers $A_1\subset A_2$ ($1\notin A_2$), it is NP-hard to decide whether the feasible set of a given mixed hypergraph is equal to $A_2$ even if it is promised that it is either $A_1$ or $A_2$. This fact has several interesting corollaries, e.g., that deciding whether a feasible set of a mixed hypergraph is gap-free is both NP-hard and coNP-hard.