The enumeration of vertex induced subgraphs with respect to the number of components

Inspired by the study of community structure in connection networks, we introduce the graph polynomial Q (G;x, y), the bivariate generating function which counts the number of connected components in induced subgraphs. We give a recursive definition of Q (G; x, y) using vertex deletion, vertex contraction and deletion of a vertex together with its neighborhood and prove a universality property. We relate Q (G; x, y) to other known graph invariants and graph polynomials, among them partition functions, the Tutte polynomial, the independence and matching polynomials, and the universal edge elimination polynomial introduced by I. Averbouch, B. Godlin and J.A. Makowsky (2008). We show that Q (G; x, y) is vertex reconstructible in the sense of Kelly and Ulam, discuss its use in computing residual connectedness reliability. Finally we show that the computation of Q (G;x, y) is ♯P-hard, but Fixed Parameter Tractable for graphs of bounded tree-width and clique-width.