Linear Rank-Width of Distance-Hereditary Graphs

We present a characterization of the linear rank-width of distance-hereditary graphs. Using the characterization, we show that the linear rank-width of every n-vertex distance-hereditary graph can be computed in time O(n²⋅log(n)), and a linear layout witnessing the linear rank-width can be computed with the same time complexity. For our characterization, we combine modifications of canonical split decompositions with an idea of [Megiddo, Hakimi, Garey, Johnson, Papadimitriou: The complexity of searching a graph. JACM 1988], used for computing the path-width of trees. We also provide a set of distance-hereditary graphs which contains the set of distance-hereditary vertex-minor obstructions for linear rank-width. The set given in [Jeong, Kwon, Oum: Excluded vertex-minors for graphs of linear rank-width at most k. STACS 2013: 221–232] is a subset of our obstruction set.