A 4/3-approximation algorithm for finding a spanning tree to maximize its internal vertices

This paper focuses on finding a spanning tree of a graph to maximize the number of its internal vertices. We present an approximation algorithm for this problem which can achieve a performance ratio 4 3 on undirected simple graphs. This improves upon the best known approximation algorithm with performance ratio 5 3 before. Our algorithm benefits from a new observation for bounding the number of internal vertices of a spanning tree, which reveals that a spanning tree of an undirected simple graph has less internal vertices than the edges a maximum path-cycle cover of that graph has. We can also give an example to show that the performance ratio 4 3 is actually tight for this algorithm. To decide how difficult it is for this problem to be approximated, we show that finding a spanning tree of an undirected simple graph to maximize its internal vertices is Max-SNP-Hard.