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.
In graph theory, the shortest path problem is the problem of finding a path between two vertices in a graph such that the sum of the weights of its constituent edges is minimized.
Robert Endre Tarjan is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is the discoverer of several graph theory algorithms, including his strongly connected components algorithm, and co-inventor of both splay trees and Fibonacci heaps. Tarjan is currently the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University.
Borůvka's algorithm is a greedy algorithm for finding a minimum spanning tree in a graph, or a minimum spanning forest in the case of a graph that is not connected.
In computer science, the clique problem is the computational problem of finding cliques in a graph. It has several different formulations depending on which cliques, and what information about the cliques, should be found. Common formulations of the clique problem include finding a maximum clique, finding a maximum weight clique in a weighted graph, listing all maximal cliques, and solving the decision problem of testing whether a graph contains a clique larger than a given size.
In graph theory, a vertex cover of a graph is a set of vertices that includes at least one endpoint of every edge of the graph.
In computer science and operations research, approximation algorithms are efficient algorithms that find approximate solutions to optimization problems with provable guarantees on the distance of the returned solution to the optimal one. Approximation algorithms naturally arise in the field of theoretical computer science as a consequence of the widely believed P ≠ NP conjecture. Under this conjecture, a wide class of optimization problems cannot be solved exactly in polynomial time. The field of approximation algorithms, therefore, tries to understand how closely it is possible to approximate optimal solutions to such problems in polynomial time. In an overwhelming majority of the cases, the guarantee of such algorithms is a multiplicative one expressed as an approximation ratio or approximation factor i.e., the optimal solution is always guaranteed to be within a (predetermined) multiplicative factor of the returned solution. However, there are also many approximation algorithms that provide an additive guarantee on the quality of the returned solution. A notable example of an approximation algorithm that provides both is the classic approximation algorithm of Lenstra, Shmoys and Tardos for scheduling on unrelated parallel machines.
A Euclidean minimum spanning tree of a finite set of points in the Euclidean plane or higher-dimensional Euclidean space connects the points by a system of line segments with the points as endpoints, minimizing the total length of the segments. In it, any two points can reach each other along a path through the line segments. It can be found as the minimum spanning tree of a complete graph with the points as vertices and the Euclidean distances between points as edge weights.
The Christofides algorithm or Christofides–Serdyukov algorithm is an algorithm for finding approximate solutions to the travelling salesman problem, on instances where the distances form a metric space . It is an approximation algorithm that guarantees that its solutions will be within a factor of 3/2 of the optimal solution length, and is named after Nicos Christofides and Anatoliy I. Serdyukov ; the latter discovered it independently in 1976.
Maximum cardinality matching is a fundamental problem in graph theory. We are given a graph G, and the goal is to find a matching containing as many edges as possible; that is, a maximum cardinality subset of the edges such that each vertex is adjacent to at most one edge of the subset. As each edge will cover exactly two vertices, this problem is equivalent to the task of finding a matching that covers as many vertices as possible.
In graph theory and computer science, the lowest common ancestor (LCA) of two nodes v and w in a tree or directed acyclic graph (DAG) T is the lowest node that has both v and w as descendants, where we define each node to be a descendant of itself.
In graph theory, the planarity testing problem is the algorithmic problem of testing whether a given graph is a planar graph (that is, whether it can be drawn in the plane without edge intersections). This is a well-studied problem in computer science for which many practical algorithms have emerged, many taking advantage of novel data structures. Most of these methods operate in O(n) time (linear time), where n is the number of edges (or vertices) in the graph, which is asymptotically optimal. Rather than just being a single Boolean value, the output of a planarity testing algorithm may be a planar graph embedding, if the graph is planar, or an obstacle to planarity such as a Kuratowski subgraph if it is not.
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 computational complexity theory, a problem is NP-complete when:
- It is a decision problem, meaning that for any input to the problem, the output is either "yes" or "no".
- When the answer is "yes", this can be demonstrated through the existence of a short solution.
- The correctness of each solution can be verified quickly and a brute-force search algorithm can find a solution by trying all possible solutions.
- The problem can be used to simulate every other problem for which we can verify quickly that a solution is correct. In this sense, NP-complete problems are the hardest of the problems to which solutions can be verified quickly. If we could find solutions of some NP-complete problem quickly, we could quickly find the solutions of every other problem to which a given solution can be easily verified.
In numerical analysis, nested dissection is a divide and conquer heuristic for the solution of sparse symmetric systems of linear equations based on graph partitioning. Nested dissection was introduced by George (1973); the name was suggested by Garrett Birkhoff.
David Ron Karger is an American computer scientist who is professor and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In graph theory and computer science, a dense subgraph is a subgraph with many edges per vertex. This is formalized as follows: let G = (V, E) be an undirected graph and let S = (VS, ES) be a subgraph of G. Then the density of S is defined to be:
In the mathematical field of graph theory, planarization is a method of extending graph drawing methods from planar graphs to graphs that are not planar, by embedding the non-planar graphs within a larger planar graph.
Valerie King is an American and Canadian computer scientist who works as a professor at the University of Victoria. Her research concerns the design and analysis of algorithms; her work has included results on maximum flow and dynamic graph algorithms, and played a role in the expected linear time MST algorithm of Karger et al.
A galactic algorithm is one with world-beating theoretical (asymptotic) performance, but which is never used in practice. Typical reasons are that the performance gains only appear for problems that are so large they never occur, or the algorithm's complexity outweighs a relatively small gain in performance. Galactic algorithms were so named by Richard Lipton and Ken Regan, because they will never be used on any data sets on Earth.
