A Lower Bound on the Average Size of a Connected Vertex Set of a Graph

Abstract

The topic is the average order of a connected induced subgraph of a graph. This generalizes, to graphs in general, the average order of a subtree of a tree. In 1984, Jamison proved that the average order, over all trees of order $n$, is minimized by the path $P_n$. In 2018, Kroeker, Mol, and Oellermann conjectured that $P_n$ minimizes the average order over all connected graphs. The main result of this paper confirms this conjecture.