Independence equivalence classes of paths

Abstract

The independence equivalence class of a graph $G$ is the set of graphs that have the same independence polynomial as $G$. A graph whose independence equivalence class contains only itself, up to isomorphism, is independence unique. Beaton, Brown and Cameron (2019) showed that paths with an odd number of vertices are independence unique and raised the problem of finding the independence equivalence class of paths with an even number of vertices. The problem is completely solved in this paper.