Closest 4-leaf power is fixed-parameter tractable

The NP-complete CLOSEST 4-LEAF POWER problem asks, given an undirected graph, whether it can be modified by at most r edge insertions or deletions such that it becomes a 4-leaf power. Herein, a 4-leaf power is a graph that can be constructed by considering an unrooted tree-the 4-leaf root-with leaves one-to-one labeled by the graph vertices, where we connect two graph vertices by an edge iff their corresponding leaves are at distance at most 4 in the tree. Complementing previous work on CLOSEST 2-LEAF POWER and CLOSEST 3-LEAF POWER, we give the first algorithmic result for CLOSEST 4-LEAF POWER, showing that CLOSEST 4-LEAF POWER is fixed-parameter tractable with respect to the parameter r. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.