A GRASP for the Convex Recoloring Problem in Graphs

In this paper, we consider a coloring as a function that assigns a color to a vertex, regardless of the color of its neighbors. The Convex Recoloring Problem finds the minimum number of recolored vertices needed to turn a coloring convex, that is, every set formed by all the vertices with the same color induces a connected subgraph. The problem is most commonly studied considering trees due to its origins in the study of phylogenetic trees, but in this paper, we focus on general graphs and propose a GRASP heuristic to solve the problem. We present computational experiments for our heuristic and compare it to an Integer Linear Programming model from the literature. In these experiments, the GRASP algorithm recolored a similar number of vertices than the model from the literature, and used considerably less time. We also introduce a set of benchmark instances for the problem.