Okay, So I am given a rooted tree for which at each vertex v I have the values N(v) and M(v) where N(v) is the value of the minimum-size vertex cover of a subtree Tv that includes the node, and M(v) is the value of the minimum-size vertex cover of a subtree Tv.
If i understand correctly, this means the root node will actually contain the minimum size vertex of the tree T (since a sub-tree of the root node is the tree itself). Therefore that means I know how big the minimum-size vertex cover of the tree will be.
I was thinking of using a greedy-approach of picking verticies with the highest degree, and then deleting the edges adjacent to that node as well as the node from the tree, and continuing in this way until there are no edges left. Would this result in a linear-time algorithm considering that we know what N(v) and M(v) are?