Dynamic Effective Resistances and Approximate Schur Complement on Separable Graphs

We consider the problem of dynamically maintaining (approximate) all-pairs effective resistances in separable graphs, which are those that admit an n^{c}-separator theorem for some c<1. We give a fully dynamic algorithm that maintains (1+epsilon)-approximations of the all-pairs effective resistances of an n-vertex graph G undergoing edge insertions and deletions with O~(sqrt{n}/epsilon^2) worst-case update time and O~(sqrt{n}/epsilon^2) worst-case query time, if G is guaranteed to be sqrt{n}-separable (i.e., it is taken from a class satisfying a sqrt{n}-separator theorem) and its separator can be computed in O~(n) time. Our algorithm is built upon a dynamic algorithm for maintaining approximate Schur complement that approximately preserves pairwise effective resistances among a set of terminals for separable graphs, which might be of independent interest. We complement our result by proving that for any two fixed vertices s and t, no incremental or decremental algorithm can maintain the s-t effective resistance for sqrt{n}-separable graphs with worst-case update time O(n^{1/2-delta}) and query time O(n^{1-delta}) for any delta>0, unless the Online Matrix Vector Multiplication (OMv) conjecture is false. We further show that for general graphs, no incremental or decremental algorithm can maintain the s-t effective resistance problem with worst-case update time O(n^{1-delta}) and query-time O(n^{2-delta}) for any delta >0, unless the OMv conjecture is false.