On the approximability of the minimum strictly fundamental cycle basis problem

We consider the problem of finding a strictly fundamental cycle basis of minimum weight in the cycle space associated with an undirected connected graph G, where a nonnegative weight is assigned to each edge of G and the total weight of a basis is defined as the sum of the weights of all the cycles in the basis. Several heuristics have been proposed to tackle this NP-hard problem, which has some interesting applications. In this paper we show that this problem is APX-hard, even when restricted to unweighted graphs, and hence does not admit a polynomial-time approximation scheme, unless P = NP. Using a recent result on the approximability of lower-stretch spanning trees (Elkin et al. (2005) [7]), we obtain that the problem is approximable within O(log^2 n log log n) for arbitrary graphs. We obtain tighter approximability bounds for dense graphs. In particular, the problem restricted to complete graphs admits a polynomial-time approximation scheme.