A New Temporal Interpretation of Cluster Editing

The NP-complete graph problem Cluster Editing seeks to transform a static graph into disjoint union of cliques by making the fewest possible edits to the edge set. We introduce a natural interpretation of this problem in the setting of temporal graphs, whose edge-sets are subject to discrete changes over time, which we call Editing to Temporal Cliques. This problem is NP-complete even when restricted to temporal graphs whose underlying graph is a path, but we obtain two polynomial-time algorithms for special cases with further restrictions. In the static setting, it is well-known that a graph is a disjoint union of cliques if and only if it contains no induced copy of $P_3$; we demonstrate that no general characterisation involving sets of at most four vertices can exist in the temporal setting, but obtain a complete characterisation involving forbidden configurations on at most five vertices. This characterisation gives rise to an FPT algorithm parameterised simultaneously by the permitted number of modifications and the lifetime of the temporal graph, which uses a simple search-tree strategy.