The well-known lower bound on the independence number of a graph due to Caro and Wei can be established as a performance guarantee of two natural and simple greedy algorithms or of a simple randomized algorithm. We study possible generalizations and improvements of these approaches using vertex weights and discuss conditions on so-called potential functions p(G) : V(G) -> N_0 defined on the vertex set of a graph G for which suitably...

Abstract: The cardinality of a largest independent set of G, denoted by α(G), is called the independence number of G. The independent domination number i(G) of a graph G is the cardinality of a smallest independent dominating set of G. We introduce the concept of the common independence number of a graph G, denoted by αc(G), as the greatest integer r such that every vertex of G belongs to some independent subset X of VG with |X|...

A potential function $f_G$ of a finite, simple and undirected graph $G=(V,E)$ is an arbitrary function $f_G : V(G) \rightarrow \mathbb{N}_0$ that assigns a nonnegative integer to every vertex of a graph $G$. In this paper we define the iterative process of computing the step potential function $q_G$ such that $q_G(v)\leq d_G(v)$ for all $v\in V(G)$. We use this function in the development of new Caro-Wei-type and Brooks-type...

The independence number a(H) of a hypergraph H is the maximum cardinality of a set of vertices of H that does not contain an edge of H. Generalizing Shearer’s classical lower bound on the independence number of triangle-free graphs Shearer (1991), and considerably improving recent results of Li and Zang (2006) and Chishti et al. (2014), we show a new lower bound for a(H) for an r-uniform linear triangle-free hypergraph H with r>=2.