Reduced Criteria for Degree Sequences

Jeffrey W. Miller

Published 2012-05-11, updated 2013-01-12Version 2

For many types of graphs, criteria have been discovered that give necessary and sufficient conditions for an integer sequence to be the degree sequence of such a graph. These criteria tend to take the form of a set of inequalities, and in the case of the Erd\H{o}s-Gallai criterion (for simple undirected graphs) and the Gale-Ryser criterion (for bipartite graphs), it has been shown that the number of inequalities that must be checked can be reduced significantly. We show that similar reductions hold for the corresponding criteria for many other types of graphs, including bipartite r-multigraphs, bipartite graphs with structural edges, directed graphs, r-multigraphs, and tournaments. We also prove a reduction for imbalance sequences.