In mathematics, graph theory is the study of graphs, which are mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects. A graph in this context is made up of vertices which are connected by edges. A distinction is made between undirected graphs, where edges link two vertices symmetrically, and directed graphs, where edges link two vertices asymmetrically. Graphs are one of the principal objects of study in discrete mathematics.
In graph theory, a tree is an undirected graph in which any two vertices are connected by exactly one path, or equivalently a connected acyclic undirected graph. A forest is an undirected graph in which any two vertices are connected by at most one path, or equivalently an acyclic undirected graph, or equivalently a disjoint union of trees.
In mathematics, particularly graph theory, and computer science, a directed acyclic graph is a directed graph with no directed cycles. That is, it consists of vertices and edges, with each edge directed from one vertex to another, such that following those directions will never form a closed loop. A directed graph is a DAG if and only if it can be topologically ordered, by arranging the vertices as a linear ordering that is consistent with all edge directions. DAGs have numerous scientific and computational applications, ranging from biology to sociology to computation (scheduling).
In mathematics, a hypergraph is a generalization of a graph in which an edge can join any number of vertices. In contrast, in an ordinary graph, an edge connects exactly two vertices.
In graph theory, a branch of mathematics, the (binary) cycle space of an undirected graph is the set of its even-degree subgraphs.
This is a glossary of graph theory. Graph theory is the study of graphs, systems of nodes or vertices connected in pairs by lines or edges.
In mathematics, and more specifically in graph theory, a graph is a structure amounting to a set of objects in which some pairs of the objects are in some sense "related". The objects correspond to mathematical abstractions called vertices and each of the related pairs of vertices is called an edge. Typically, a graph is depicted in diagrammatic form as a set of dots or circles for the vertices, joined by lines or curves for the edges. Graphs are one of the objects of study in discrete mathematics.
A graphical model or probabilistic graphical model (PGM) or structured probabilistic model is a probabilistic model for which a graph expresses the conditional dependence structure between random variables. They are commonly used in probability theory, statistics—particularly Bayesian statistics—and machine learning.
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 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 mathematics and computer science, connectivity is one of the basic concepts of graph theory: it asks for the minimum number of elements that need to be removed to separate the remaining nodes into two or more isolated subgraphs. It is closely related to the theory of network flow problems. The connectivity of a graph is an important measure of its resilience as a network.
In mathematics, and more specifically in graph theory, a polytree is a directed acyclic graph whose underlying undirected graph is a tree. In other words, if we replace its directed edges with undirected edges, we obtain an undirected graph that is both connected and acyclic.
A feedback arc set (FAS) or feedback edge set is a set of edges which, when removed from the graph, leaves an acyclic graph. Put another way, it is a set containing at least one edge of every cycle in the graph. In graph theory, a directed graph may contain directed cycles, a closed one-way path of edges. In some applications, such cycles are undesirable, and we wish to eliminate them and obtain a directed acyclic graph (DAG). One way to do this is simply to drop edges from the graph to break the cycles.
In mathematics, a transitive reduction of a directed graph D is another directed graph with the same vertices and as few edges as possible, such that for all pairs of vertices v, w a (directed) path from v to w in D exists if and only if such a path exists in the reduction. Transitive reductions were introduced by Aho, Garey & Ullman (1972), who provided tight bounds on the computational complexity of constructing them.
In mathematics, and more specifically in graph theory, a directed graph is a graph that is made up of a set of vertices connected by edges, where the edges have a direction associated with them.
Clique complexes, flag complexes, and conformal hypergraphs are closely related mathematical objects in graph theory and geometric topology that each describe the cliques of an undirected graph.
In graph theory, a well-covered graph is an undirected graph in which every minimal vertex cover has the same size as every other minimal vertex cover. Equivalently, these are the graphs in which every maximal independent set has the same size. Well-covered graphs were defined and first studied by Plummer (1970).
A mixed graphG = is a mathematical object consisting of a set of vertices V, a set of (undirected) edges E, and a set of directed edges A.
A graphoid is a set of statements of the form, "X is irrelevant to Y given that we know Z" where X, Y and Z are sets of variables. The notion of "irrelevance" and "given that we know" may obtain different interpretations, including probabilistic, relational and correlational, depending on the application. These interpretations share common properties that can be captured by paths in graphs. The theory of graphoids characterizes these properties in a finite set of axioms that are common to informational irrelevance and its graphical representations.
