Bounding the number of $(\sigma,\rho)$-dominating sets in trees, forests and graphs of bounded pathwidth

Abstract

The notion of $(\sigma,\rho)$-dominating set generalizes many notions including dominating set, induced matching, perfect codes or independent sets. Bounds on the maximal number of such (maximal, minimal) sets were established for different $\sigma$ and $\rho$ and different classes of graphs. In particular, Rote showed that the number of minimal dominating sets in trees of order $n$ is at most $95^{\frac{n}{13}}$ and Golovach et Al. computed the asymptotic of the number of $(\sigma,\rho)$-dominating sets in paths for all $\sigma$ and $\rho$. Here, we propose a method to compute bounds on the number of $(\sigma,\rho)$-dominating sets in graphs or bounded pathwidth, trees and forests, under the conditions that $\sigma$ and $\rho$ are finite unions of (possibly infinite) arithmetic progressions. It seems that this method shouldn't always work, but in practice we are able to give many sharp bounds by direct application of the method. Moreover, in the case of graphs of bounded pathwidth, we deduce the existence of an algorithm that can output abritrarily good approximations of the growth rate.