I've got a DAG of around 3.300 vertices which can be laid out quite successfully by dot as a more or less simple tree (things get complicated because vertices can have more than one predecessor from a whole different rank, so crossovers are frequent). Each vertex in the graph came into being at a specific time in the original process and I want one axis in the layout to represent time: An edge relation like a -> v, b -> v means that a and b came into being at some specific time before v.
Is there a layout algorithm for DAGs which would allow me to specify the positions (or at least the distances) on one axis and come up with an optimal layout regarding edge crossovers on the other?
You can make a topological sorting of the DAG to have the vertices sorted in a way that for every edge x->y, vertex x comes before than y.
Therefore, if you have a -> v, b -> v, you will get something like a, b, v or b, a, v.
Using this you can easily represents DAGs like this:
Yes, as #Arturo-Menchaca said a topological sorting may help to reduce overlapping count of edges. But it may be not optimal. There is no good algorithm for edge crossing minimization. Problem for crossing minimization is NP-complete. The heuristics are applied for solving this problem.
This StackOverflow link may help you: Drawing Directed Acyclic Graphs: Minimizing edge crossing?
I suppose your problem is related to an aesthetically pleasing way of the graph layout. Some heuristics are described in the articles Overview of algorithms for graph drawing, Force-Directed Drawing Algorithms. May be information about planar graph or almost planar graph can help you also.
Some review of the algorithms for checking and drawing planar graphs are described in the Wiki pages Planar graph, Crossing number (graph theory). The libraries and algorithms for planar graph drawing are described in the StackOverflow question How to check if a Graph is a Planar Graph or not? For example the author in the article GA for straight-line grid drawings of maximal planar graphs uses genetic algorithms for straight-line grid drawing.
Good descriptions for almost planar graphs are given in the articles Straight-Line Drawability of a Planar Graph Plus an Edge, On the Crossing Number of Almost Planar Graphs.
Try to modify the original algoritms using your condition with one axis alignment.
If I understood you correctly then you want to minimize the number of edge-crossings in your graph layout. If so, then the answer is "No", because this problem is proved to be NP-complete in the general case. See this, "Crossing Number is NP-Complete, Garey, Johnson".
If you need a not an optimal but just good enough solution, there are multiple articles on this topic because it is heavily related with circuit layouts. Probably googling "crossing number heuristics" and looking through the abstracts of some papers will solve your task better then me trying to guess blindly your requirements.
Related
EDIT: Precisely, I am trying to find two disjoint independent sets of known size in a graph shaped like a triangular grid, which may have holes and has a variable perimeter shape.
I'm not very well versed in graph theory, so I'm not sure if there exists an efficient solution for this problem. Consider the following graphs:
The colors of any two nodes can be swapped. The goal is to ensure that no two red nodes are adjacent, and no two green nodes are adjacent. The edges marked with exclamation points are invalid. Basically, I need to write two algorithms:
Determine that the nodes in a given graph can be arranged so that red and green nodes are not adjacent to nodes of the same color.
Actually rearrange the nodes.
I'm a little lost on how to implement this. It's not too difficult to separate the nodes of one color, but repeating the process for the second color may mess up the first color. Without a way to determine whether the graph can actually be arranged properly, this process could loop forever.
Is there some kind of algorithm that I can use/write for this? I'm mainly interested in the first image's graph (a triangular grid), but a generic algorithm would work as well.
First, let's note that the problem is a variant of graph coloring.
Now, if you only dealing with 2 colors (red,green) - coloring a graph with 2 colors is fairly easy, and is basically done by finding out if the graph is bipartite, and coloring each "side" of the graph in one color. Finding if a graph is bipartite is fairly simple.
However, if you want more than two colors, the problem becomes NP-Complete, and is actually a variant of the Graph Coloring Problem.
Graph Coloring Problem:
Given a graph G=(V,E) and a number k determine if there is a
function c:V->{1,2.,,,.k} such that c(v) = v(u) -> (v,u) is not an
edge.
Informally, you can color the graph in k colors, and you need to determine if there is some coloring such that you never color 2 nodes that share an edge with the same color.
Note that while it seems your problem is slightly easier, since you already know what is the number of nodes in each color, it doesn't really make a difference.
Assume you have a polynomial time algorithm A that solves your problem.
Now, given an instance (G,k) of graph coloring - there are only O(n^3) possibilities to #color1,#color2,#color3 - so by examining each of these and invoking A on it, you can find a polynomial time solution to Graph-Coloring. This will mean P=NP, which is most likely (according to most CS researchers) not the case.
tl;dr:
For 2 colors: find out if the graph is bipartite - and give one color to each side of the graph.
For 3 or more colors: There is no known efficient solution, and the general belief is one does not exist.
I thought this problem would be easier for planar graph, but unfortunately it's not the case. Best match for this problem I was able to find is minimum sum coloring and largest bipartite subgraph.
For largest bipartite subgraph, assume that number of reds + number of greens exactly match the size of largest bipartite subgraph. Then this problem is equivalent to your. Paper claims that it's still NP-hard even for planar graphs.
For minimum sum coloring, assume that red color has weight 1, green color has color 2, and we have infinitely many blue* colors with some weight of >graph size. Then if answer is exactly minimal sum coloring, there is no polynomial algorithm to find it (although paper referes to such algorithm for chordal graphs).
Anyway, it seems that the closer your red+green count to the 'optimal' in some sense subgraph, the more difficult problem is.
If you can afford inexact solution, or relaxed solution then you only spearate, say, reds, you have an option. As I said in comment, approximate solution of maximum independent set problem for planar graph. Then color this set into red and blue colors, if it is large enough.
If you know that red+green is much less than total number of vertices, another approximation can work. Look at introduction chapter of this article. It claims that:
For graphs which are promised to have small chromatic number, a better
guarantee is known: given a k-colorable graph, an algorithm due to
Karger et al. [12] uses semidefinite programming (SDP) to find an
independent set of size about Ω(n/∆^(1−2/k)).
Your graph is for sure 4-colorable, so you can count on large enough independent set. The same article states that greedy solution already can find large enough independent set.
Below is the exercise 5.25 in 《Introduction to algorithms, a creative approach》. After reading it several times, I still can't understand what it means. I can color a tree with 2 colors very easily and directly using the method it described, not 1+LogN colors.
《Begin》
This exercise is related to the wrong algorithm for determining whether a graph is bipartite, described in Section 5.11.In some sense, this exercise shows that not only is the algorithm wrong, but also the simple approach can not work. Consider the more general problem of graph coloring: Given an undirected graph G=(V,E), a valid coloring of G is an assignment of colors to the vertices such that no two adjacent vertices have the same color. The problem is to find a valid coloring, using as few colors as possible. (In general, this is a very difficult problem; it is discussed in Chapter 11.)
Thus, a graph is bipartite if it can be colored with two colors.
A. Prove by induction that trees are always bipartite.
B. We assume that the graph is a tree(which means that the graph is bipartite). We want to find a partition of the vertices into the two subsets such that there are no edges connecting vertices within one subset.
Consider again the wrong algorithm for determining whether a graph is bipartite, given in Section 5.11: We take an arbitrary vertex, remove it, color the rest(by induction), and then color the vertex in the best possible way. That is, we color the vertex with the oldest possible color, and add a new color only if the vertex is connected to vertices of all the old colors. Prove that, if we color one vertex at a time regardless of the global connections, we may need up to 1+logN colors.
You should design a construction that maximizes the number of colors for every order of choosing vertices. The construction can depend on the order in the following way.
The algorithm picks a vertex as a next vertex and starts checking the vertex’s edges. At that point, you are allowed to add edges incident to this vertex as you desire, provided that the graph remains a tree, such that, at the end, the maximal number of colors will be required. You can not remove an edge after it is put in(that would be cleanining the algorithm, which has already seen the edge). The best way to achieve this construction is by induction. Assume that you know a construction that requires<=k colors with few vertices, and build one that requires k+1 colors without adding too many new vertices.
《End》
I'm just wondering if, like for strings where we have the Levenshtein distance (or edit distance) between two strings, is there something similar for graphs?
I mean, a scalar measure that identifies the number of atomic operations (node and edges insertion/deletion) to transform a graph G1 to a graph G2.
I think graph edit distance is the measure that you were looking for.
Graph edit distance measures the minimum number of graph edit operations to transform one graph to another, and the allowed graph edit operations includes:
Insert/delete an isolated vertex
Insert/delete an edge
Change the label of a vertex/edge (if labeled graphs)
However, computing the graph edit distance between two graphs is NP-hard. The most efficient algorithm for computing this is an A*-based algorithm, and there are other sub-optimal algorithms.
You should look at the paper A survey of graph edit distance
For a general graph it is a NP-complete problem as others mentioned in their answer. But for tree graph there are well known polynomial algorithms. May be most famous of them is "Zhang Shasha" algorithm which was published in 1989.
Note:
The Levenshtein distance (or edit distance) is between two strings
But in Graph you should search between at least N! position that you find Identity of each edge and vertex.
You can compare between two graph by unique index easily,But
The master question is define identity for each vertex and edge.this question (find identity for each vertex and edge in two graph that they can to transform ) is very hard and was called isomorphism problem (NP-Complete).
You can search about isomorphism graph.
So I'm a cs student, and we were asked to build a backtracking program in c (no loops only recursion) which gets an adjacency matrix of an undirected unweighed (no lifts) graph, and returns the number of perfect matching in that graph or zero otherwise.
I thought of using fkt algorithm which uses the pfaffian orientation, but so far I haven't figured out how to do so.
If you could be so very kind and maybe direct me to the right book or the right way to look at this question I'll be very grateful.
It's the first time I tried to backtrack and I think I'm missing some basic conceptions of how to implement such a thing.
FKT is for planar graphs only. If you want to implement it (and you almost certainly don't, since that would be a lousy homework; this is for other people who find this question), you'll need to planarity test the graph in such a way that you obtain an embedding, then implement the orientation algorithm described in these slides. (Sketch: find a spanning tree in the primal graph and orient those edges arbitrarily. The edges not in the spanning tree comprise a spanning tree in the dual graph. Visit the nodes of the latter tree in postorder; the parent edge of each node (= primal face) visited is the last incident edge whose orientation is undetermined, so orient it clockwise if the face currently has an even number of clockwise edges and counterclockwise otherwise.)
I have a DAG with many thousands of vertexes and edges.
I'm looking for algorithms that can position the vertexes on grid points in a way that's the most human friendly / aesthetic. My hunch is that the nicest layout would be similar to the layout with minimum sum of edge lengths.
Can you point me to efficient algorithms for such minimum sum of edge lengths layouts, or to other algorithms that could help me tackle this problem?
Here's part of the output from a very naive algorithm:
I'm pretty sure this is an open problem ("graph drawing"). A couple other things you might want to consider optimizing:
Angle between edges coming from a vertex (maximize)
Number of edge crossings (minimize)
You might be able to use a genetic algorithm or some other sort of metaheuristic, but I don't know how good the results will be.