Vertex Sparsification: An Introduction, Connections and Applications
The notion of exactly (or approximately) representing certain combinatorial properties of a graph $G$ on a simpler graph is ubiquitous in combinatorial optimization. In this talk, I will introduce the notion of vertex sparsification. Here we are given a graph $G = (V, E)$ and a set of terminals $K \subset V$ and our goal is to find one single graph $H = (K, E_H)$ on just the terminal set so that $H$ approximately preserves the minimum cut between every bi-partition of the terminals.