Quenched worst-case scenario for root deletion in targeted cutting of random recursive trees

Abstract We propose a method for cutting down a random recursive tree that focuses on its higher-degree vertices. Enumerate the vertices of a random recursive tree of size n according to the decreasing order of their degrees; namely, let $(v^{(i)})_{i=1}^{n}$ be such that $\deg(v^{(1)}) \geq \cdots \geq \deg (v^{(n)})$ . The targeted vertex-cutting process is performed by sequentially removing vertices $v^{(1)}, v^{(2)}, \ldots, v^{(n)}$ and keeping only the subtree containing the root after each removal. The algorithm ends when the root is picked to be removed. The total number of steps for this procedure, $K_n$ , is upper bounded by $Z_{\geq D}$ , which denotes the number of vertices that have degree at least as large as the degree of the root. We prove that $\ln Z_{\geq D}$ grows as $\ln n$ asymptotically and obtain its limiting behavior in probability. Moreover, we obtain that the k th moment of $\ln Z_{\geq D}$ is proportional to $(\!\ln n)^k$ . As a consequence, we obtain that the first-order growth of $K_n$ is upper bounded by $n^{1-\ln 2}$ , which is substantially smaller than the required number of removals if, instead, the vertices were selected uniformly at random.