A minimum spanning tree (MST) or minimum weight spanning tree is a subset of the edges of a connected, edge-weighted undirected graph that connects all the vertices together, without any cycles and with the minimum possible total edge weight. That is, it is a spanning tree whose sum of edge weights is as small as possible. More generally, any edge-weighted undirected graph has a minimum spanning forest, which is a union of the minimum spanning trees for its connected components.
Kruskal's algorithm finds a minimum spanning forest of an undirected edge-weighted graph. If the graph is connected, it finds a minimum spanning tree. It is a greedy algorithm in graph theory as in each step it adds the next lowest-weight edge that will not form a cycle to the minimum spanning forest.
In graph theory, an Eulerian trail is a trail in a finite graph that visits every edge exactly once. Similarly, an Eulerian circuit or Eulerian cycle is an Eulerian trail that starts and ends on the same vertex. They were first discussed by Leonhard Euler while solving the famous Seven Bridges of Königsberg problem in 1736. The problem can be stated mathematically like this:
In the mathematical field of graph theory, a spanning treeT of an undirected graph G is a subgraph that is a tree which includes all of the vertices of G. In general, a graph may have several spanning trees, but a graph that is not connected will not contain a spanning tree. If all of the edges of G are also edges of a spanning tree T of G, then G is a tree and is identical to T.
In computer science, a graph is an abstract data type that is meant to implement the undirected graph and directed graph concepts from the field of graph theory within mathematics.
In the mathematical theory of directed graphs, a graph is said to be strongly connected if every vertex is reachable from every other vertex. The strongly connected components of an arbitrary directed graph form a partition into subgraphs that are themselves strongly connected. It is possible to test the strong connectivity of a graph, or to find its strongly connected components, in linear time.
In graph theory, an edge coloring of a graph is an assignment of "colors" to the edges of the graph so that no two incident edges have the same color. For example, the figure to the right shows an edge coloring of a graph by the colors red, blue, and green. Edge colorings are one of several different types of graph coloring. The edge-coloring problem asks whether it is possible to color the edges of a given graph using at most k different colors, for a given value of k, or with the fewest possible colors. The minimum required number of colors for the edges of a given graph is called the chromatic index of the graph. For example, the edges of the graph in the illustration can be colored by three colors but cannot be colored by two colors, so the graph shown has chromatic index three.
In the mathematical area of graph theory, a chordal graph is one in which all cycles of four or more vertices have a chord, which is an edge that is not part of the cycle but connects two vertices of the cycle. Equivalently, every induced cycle in the graph should have exactly three vertices. The chordal graphs may also be characterized as the graphs that have perfect elimination orderings, as the graphs in which each minimal separator is a clique, and as the intersection graphs of subtrees of a tree. They are sometimes also called rigid circuit graphs or triangulated graphs.
In computer science, a topological sort or topological ordering of a directed graph is a linear ordering of its vertices such that for every directed edge uv from vertex u to vertex v, u comes before v in the ordering. For instance, the vertices of the graph may represent tasks to be performed, and the edges may represent constraints that one task must be performed before another; in this application, a topological ordering is just a valid sequence for the tasks. Precisely, a topological sort is a graph traversal in which each node v is visited only after all its dependencies are visited. A topological ordering is possible if and only if the graph has no directed cycles, that is, if it is a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Any DAG has at least one topological ordering, and algorithms are known for constructing a topological ordering of any DAG in linear time. Topological sorting has many applications especially in ranking problems such as feedback arc set. Topological sorting is possible even when the DAG has disconnected components.
In graph theory, reachability refers to the ability to get from one vertex to another within a graph. A vertex can reach a vertex if there exists a sequence of adjacent vertices which starts with and ends with .
In graph theory, a path decomposition of a graph G is, informally, a representation of G as a "thickened" path graph, and the pathwidth of G is a number that measures how much the path was thickened to form G. More formally, a path-decomposition is a sequence of subsets of vertices of G such that the endpoints of each edge appear in one of the subsets and such that each vertex appears in a contiguous subsequence of the subsets, and the pathwidth is one less than the size of the largest set in such a decomposition. Pathwidth is also known as interval thickness, vertex separation number, or node searching number.
In computer science, the Hopcroft–Karp algorithm is an algorithm that takes a bipartite graph as input and produces a maximum cardinality matching as output – a set of as many edges as possible with the property that no two edges share an endpoint. It runs in time in the worst case, where is set of edges in the graph, is set of vertices of the graph, and it is assumed that . In the case of dense graphs the time bound becomes , and for sparse random graphs it runs in time with high probability.
In computer science, graph traversal refers to the process of visiting each vertex in a graph. Such traversals are classified by the order in which the vertices are visited. Tree traversal is a special case of graph traversal.
In mathematics, a graph partition is the reduction of a graph to a smaller graph by partitioning its set of nodes into mutually exclusive groups. Edges of the original graph that cross between the groups will produce edges in the partitioned graph. If the number of resulting edges is small compared to the original graph, then the partitioned graph may be better suited for analysis and problem-solving than the original. Finding a partition that simplifies graph analysis is a hard problem, but one that has applications to scientific computing, VLSI circuit design, and task scheduling in multiprocessor computers, among others. Recently, the graph partition problem has gained importance due to its application for clustering and detection of cliques in social, pathological and biological networks. For a survey on recent trends in computational methods and applications see Buluc et al. (2013). Two common examples of graph partitioning are minimum cut and maximum cut problems.
In graph theory, the planar separator theorem is a form of isoperimetric inequality for planar graphs, that states that any planar graph can be split into smaller pieces by removing a small number of vertices. Specifically, the removal of vertices from an n-vertex graph can partition the graph into disjoint subgraphs each of which has at most vertices.
In computer science, lexicographic breadth-first search or Lex-BFS is a linear time algorithm for ordering the vertices of a graph. The algorithm is different from a breadth-first search, but it produces an ordering that is consistent with breadth-first search.
In mathematics, the multi-level technique is a technique used to solve the graph partitioning problem.
In graph theory, a k-degenerate graph is an undirected graph in which every subgraph has a vertex of degree at most k: that is, some vertex in the subgraph touches k or fewer of the subgraph's edges. The degeneracy of a graph is the smallest value of k for which it is k-degenerate. The degeneracy of a graph is a measure of how sparse it is, and is within a constant factor of other sparsity measures such as the arboricity of a graph.
In computer science, the method of contraction hierarchies is a speed-up technique for finding the shortest-path in a graph. The most intuitive applications are car-navigation systems: a user wants to drive from to using the quickest possible route. The metric optimized here is the travel time. Intersections are represented by vertices, the road sections connecting them by edges. The edge weights represent the time it takes to drive along this segment of the road. A path from to is a sequence of edges ; the shortest path is the one with the minimal sum of edge weights among all possible paths. The shortest path in a graph can be computed using Dijkstra's algorithm but, given that road networks consist of tens of millions of vertices, this is impractical. Contraction hierarchies is a speed-up method optimized to exploit properties of graphs representing road networks. The speed-up is achieved by creating shortcuts in a preprocessing phase which are then used during a shortest-path query to skip over "unimportant" vertices. This is based on the observation that road networks are highly hierarchical. Some intersections, for example highway junctions, are "more important" and higher up in the hierarchy than for example a junction leading into a dead end. Shortcuts can be used to save the precomputed distance between two important junctions such that the algorithm doesn't have to consider the full path between these junctions at query time. Contraction hierarchies do not know about which roads humans consider "important", but they are provided with the graph as input and are able to assign importance to vertices using heuristics.
In the design of algorithms, partition refinement is a technique for representing a partition of a set as a data structure that allows the partition to be refined by splitting its sets into a larger number of smaller sets. In that sense it is dual to the union-find data structure, which also maintains a partition into disjoint sets but in which the operations merge pairs of sets. In some applications of partition refinement, such as lexicographic breadth-first search, the data structure maintains as well an ordering on the sets in the partition.
