A new formula for the decycling number of regular graphs

The decycling number $?\left(G\right)$ of a graph $G$ is the smallest number of vertices which can be removed from $G$ so that the resultant graph contains no cycle. A decycling set containing exactly $?\left(G\right)$ vertices of $G$ is called a $?$-set. For any decycling set $S$ of a $k$-regular graph $G$, we show that $\left|S\right|=\frac{\beta \left(G\right)+m\left(S\right)}{k?1}$, where $\beta \left(G\right)$ is the cycle rank of $G$, $m\left(S\right)=c+\left|E\left(S\right)\right|?1$ is the margin number of $S$, $c$ and $\left|E\left(S\right)\right|$ are, respectively, the number of components of $G?S$ and the number of edges in $GS]$. In particular, for any $?$-set $S$ of a 3-regular graph $G$, we prove that $m\left(S\right)=\xi \left(G\right)$, where $\xi \left(G\right)$ is the Betti deficiency of $G$. This implies that the decycling number of a 3-regular graph $G$ is $\frac{\beta \left(G\right)+\xi \left(G\right)}{2}$. Hence $?\left(G\right)=?\frac{\beta \left(G\right)}{2}?$ for a 3-regular upper-embeddable graph $G$, which concludes the results in Gao et al., 2015, Wei and Li, 2013] and solves two open problems posed by Bau and Beineke (2002). Considering an algorithm by Furst et al., (1988), there exists a polynomial time algorithm to compute $Z\left(G\right)$, the cardinality of a maximum nonseparating independent set in a $3$-regular graph $G$, which solves an open problem raised by Speckenmeyer (1988). As for a 4-regular graph $G$, we show that for any $?$-set $S$ of $G$, there exists a spanning tree $T$ of $G$ such that the elements of $S$ are simply the leaves of $T$ with at most two exceptions providing $?\left(G\right)=?\frac{\beta \left(G\right)}{3}?$. On the other hand, if $G$ is a loopless graph on $n$ vertices with maximum degree at most $4$, then

The above two upper bounds are tight, and this makes an extension of a result due to Punnim (2006).