Graph Topology Profiling - algorithm

Can anyone suggest me some algorithms that can be used to analyze the graph topology classification?
Input: Adjacency list with raw graph information.
Output : What kind of graph is it? Currently I want to focus only on Pure Types - Daisy chain, Mesh, Ring, Star, Tree.
Which area of algorithm study is responsible for such algorithm? Is it Computational Geometry?
Edit - The size of graph will not exceed 32 nodes. However, there will be redundant links between nodes.
Edit - I understand that my question might be too broad, but at least give me the clue of what is wrong with the question before down-voting it. Or is it because of my reputation :-(

Start by checking that your graph is fully connected.
Then, check the distribution of the nodes' degree:
Ring: All nodes would have degree 2
Daisy chain: all nodes would have degree 2 except for 2 nodes with degree 1 (there are alternative definitions for what a daisy chain is).
Star: Each node would have degree 1, except for one node with degree n-1
Tree: The sum of the degrees is 2*(number of nodes-1). Also, if the highest degree is k, then there are at least k nodes with degree 1.
Mesh: Anything goes...
I don't think there is a 'area' of algorithms that deals with such problems, but the term 'graph classes' is quite common (See for example here), though it is not a formal term.

To classify a new instance, you need a classification system in the first place!
Putting it another way, your graph (the item to classify) fits somewhere in some kind of data structure of graph topologies (the classification system). The system could be as simple as a list; in which case, you carry out the simple algorithm outlined in this other post where the list of topologies is keyed by degree distribution.
A more complex system could be a hierarchical one, similar to biological classification systems. This would only really be necessary for very large numbers of graph topologies, where it would make it faster to classify based on a series of decisions. Essentially a decision tree.
It may be difficult to find much research in this area (for pure graphs) as it's a little hard to think of applications. There are applications for protein fold topologies, but that may not be of interest.

Related

How to divide a connected weighted graph to N semi-equal subgraphs

I have a graph of many hundred nodes that are mainly connected with each other. I can do processing on entire graph but it really takes a lot of time, so I would like to divide it to smaller sub-graphs of approximately similar size.
With other words. I have a collection of aerial images and I do pairwise image matching on all of them. As a result I get a set of matches for each pair (pixel from first image matched with pixel on second image). Number of matches is considered as weight of this (undirected) edge. These edges then form a graph mentioned above.
I'm not so familiar with graph theory (as it is a very broad topic). What is the best algorithm for this job?
Thank you.
Edit:
This problem has a perfect analogy which I think is easier to understand. Imagine you have a set of people and their connections/friendships, like I social network. Each friendship has a numeric value/weight representing how good friends they are. So in a large group of people I want to get k most interconnected sub-groups .
Unfortunately, the problem you're describing is almost certainly NP-hard. From a graph perspective, you have a graph where each edge has a weight on it. You're trying to split the graph into relatively equal pieces while cutting the lowest total cost of edges cut. This problem is called the maximum k-cut problem and is NP-hard. If you introduce the constraint that you also want to try to make the pieces roughly even in size, you have the balanced k-cut problem, which is also NP-hard.
The good news is that there are nice approximation algorithms for these problems, so if you're looking for solutions that are just "good enough," then you can probably find a library somewhere that implements them. There are also other techniques like spectral clustering which work well in practice and are really fast, but which don't have any guarantees on how well they'll do.

What clustering algorithms can I consider for graph?

Suppose I have an undirected weighted connected graph. I want to group vertices that have highest edges' value all together (vertices degree). Using clustering algorithms is one way. What clustering algorithms can I consider for this task? I hope it is clear; any question for clarification, please ask. Thanks.
There are two main approach - giving your graph as an input to existing tool, or using expert knowledge you have on this graph (and its domain) in order to create a representation, and then apply machine learning methods on it.
I'll start with the second approach:
If you have only the nodes and edges (no farther data for each node), you first need to think of a representation for each node\edge. I going to explain about nodes, but it should should be similar for edges' case.
The simplest approach is to represent each node n as a connectivity vector:
Every node will be represented as n=(Ia(n),Ib(n),Ic(n),Id(n),Ie(n)), where Ii(n)=1 in case node n is a 'friend' (neighbor) of node i, and 0 otherwise. (e.g.a=(0,1,1,0,1))
Note that you can decide if a node is a friend of itself.
Second approach, which is quite similar to the first one, is to use edges' weights vector:
n=(W(a,n),W(b,n),W(c,n),W(d,n),W(e,n)) , where W(i,n) is the weight of the edge (i,n).
There are a few more ways to represent nodes, but this is enough in order to run some calculations on it.
After you have this presentation, you can start applying some clustering algorithms on it.
kmeans is considered great for this task, and sklearn has a great implementation. It has some parameters you can (and should) configure (i.e. the distance measure).
The product of kmeans, is k different non-intersecting groups of nodes.
If you want to pass you graph to an algorithm and get some measures, there are more advanced algorithms you can apply. community detection is used to find communities in a graph. Again, there is a nice python implementation in the networkxpackage.

Finding a minimum/maximum weight Steiner tree

I asked this question on reddit, but haven't converged on a solution yet. Since many of my searches bring me to Stack Overflow, I decided I would give this a try. Here is a simple formulation of my problem:
Given a weighted undirected graph G(V,E,w) and a subset of vertices S in G, find the min/max weight tree that spans S. Adding vertices is not allowed. An extension of the basic model is adding edges with 0 weight, and vertices that must be excluded. This seems similar to the question asked here:
Algorithm to find minimum spanning tree of chosen vertices
There is also more insight into what values the edges can take. Each edge is actually a correlation probability, which I can encode in several ways, so the main questions I want to ask the graph are:
Given k vertices that must be connected, what are the top X min/max spanning trees that connect them, and what vertices do they pass through? As I understand it, this is the same question as asking the graph what is the highest probability of connecting all of the k vertices.
Getting more vague, is there a logical way to cluster the nodes?
As for implementation, I have the boost libraries installed, and once I get the framework rolling on this problem, I can deal with how to multi-thread it (if appropriate), what kind of graph to use, and how to store/cache the data, since the number of vertices and edges is going to be quite large.
Update
Looking at the problem I am trying to solve, it makes sense that it would be NP-complete. The real world problem that I am trying to solve involves medical diagnoses; specifically when the medical community is working on a problem with a specific idea in mind, and they need to take a step back and reconsider how they got there. What I want from the program I am trying to design is:
Given several conditions, tests, symptoms, age, gender, season, confirmed diagnosis, timeline, how can you relate them? What cells/tissues/organs/systems are touched? Are they even related?
Along with the defined groups that conditions/symptoms can belong to, is there a way to logically group the conditions/symptoms?
Example
Flu-like symptoms, red eyes, early pneumonia, and some of the signs of diabetes. Is there a way to relate all of the symptoms? Are there some tests that could be done to make it easier to determine? What systems are involved?
It just seemed natural to try and map this to a graph, or several graphs, and use probabilities as the correlation between different symptoms/conditions.
I have seen models for your problem that were mostly based on Bayesian inference and fuzzy logic. Bayesian inference networks express the relation between causes and effects e.g. smoking and lung cancer. Look here for a quick tutorial. You can apply fuzzy logic to that modelling to try to take into account the variablility in real life (as not everyone gets lung cancer).

Why do these maze generation algorithms produce mazes with different properties?

I was browsing the Wikipedia entry on maze generation algorithms and found that the article strongly insinuated that different maze generation algorithms (randomized depth-first search, randomized Kruskal's, etc.) produce mazes with different characteristics. This seems to suggest that the algorithms produce random mazes with different probability distributions over the set of all single-solution mazes (spanning trees on a rectangular grid).
My questions are:
Is this correct? That is, am I reading this article correctly, and is the article correct?
If so, why? I don't see an intuitive reason why the different algorithms would produce different distributions.
Uh well I think it's pretty obvious different algorithms generate different mazes. Let's just talk about spanning trees of a grid. Suppose you have a grid G and you have two algorithms to generate a spanning tree for the grid:
Algorithm A:
Pick any edge of the grid, with 99% probability choose a horizontal one, otherwise a vertical one
Add the edge to the maze, unless adding it would create a cycle
Stop when every vertex is connected to every other vertex (spanning tree complete)
Algorithm B:
As algorithm A, but set the probability to 1% instead of 99%
"Obviously" algorithm A produces mazes with lots of horizontal passages and algorithm B mazes with lots of vertical passages. That is, there is a statistical correlation between the number of horizontal passages in a maze and the maze being produced by algorithm A.
Of course the differences between the Wikipedia algorithms are more intricate but the principle is the same. The algorithms sample the space of possible mazes for a given grid in a non-uniform, structured way.
LOL I remember a scientific conference where a researcher presented her results about her algorithm that did something "for graphs". The results were statistical and presented for "random graphs". Someone asked from the audience "which distribution of random graphs did you draw the graphs from?" The answer: "uh... they were produced by our graph generation program". Duh!
Interesting question. Here my random 2c.
Comparing Prim's to, say, DFS, the latter seems to have a proclivity for producing deeper trees simply due to the fact that the first 'runs' have more space to create deep trees with less branches. Prim's algorithm, on the other hand, appears to create trees with more branching due to the fact that any open branch can be selected at each iteration.
One way to ask this would be to look at what is the probability that each algorithm will produce a tree of depth > N. I have a hunch that they would be different. A more formal approach to do proving this might be to assign some weights to each part of the tree and show it's more likely to be taken or attempt to characterize the space some other way, but I'll be hand wavy and guessing it's correct :). I'm interested in what lead to you think it wouldn't be, because my intuition was the opposite. And no, the Wiki article doesn't give a convincing argument.
EDIT
One simple way to see this to consider an initial tree with two children with a total of k nodes
e.g.,
*---* ... *
\--* ... *
Choose a random node as the start and end. DFS will produce one of two mazes, either the entire tree, or the part of it with the direct path from start to end. Prim's algorithm will produce the 'maze' with the direct path from start to end with secondary paths of length 1 ... k.
It is not statistical until you request that each algorithm produce every solution it can.
What you are perceiving as statistical bias is only a bias towards the preferred, first solution.
That bias may not be algorithmic (set-theory-wise) but implementation dependent (like the bias in the choice of the pivot in quicksort).
Yes, it is correct. You can produce different mazes by starting the process in different ways. Some algorithms start with a fully closed grid and remove walls to generate a path through the maze while some start with a empty grid and add walls leaving behind a path. This alone can produce different results.

Graph Isomorphism

Is there an algorithm or heuristics for graph isomorphism?
Corollary: A graph can be represented in different different drawings.
What s the best approach to find different drawing of a graph?
It is a hell of a problem.
In general, the basic idea is to simplify the graph into a canonical form, and then perform comparison of canonical forms. Spanning trees are generated with this objective, but spanning trees are not unique, so you need to have a canonical way to create them.
After you have canonical forms, you can perform isomorphism comparison (relatively) easy, but that's just the start, since non-isomorphic graphs can have the same spanning tree. (e.g. think about a spanning tree T and a single addition of an edge to it to create T'. These two graphs are not isomorph, but they have the same spanning tree).
Other techniques involve comparing descriptors (e.g. number of nodes, number of edges), which can produce false positive in general.
I suggest you to start with the wiki page about the graph isomorphism problem. I also have a book to suggest: "Graph Theory and its applications". It's a tome, but worth every page.
As from you corollary, every possible spatial distribution of a given graph's vertexes is an isomorph. So two isomorph graphs have the same topology and they are, in the end, the same graph, from the topological point of view. Another matter is, for example, to find those isomorph structures enjoying particular properties (e.g. with non crossing edges, if exists), and that depends on the properties you want.
One of the best algorithms out there for finding graph isomorphisms is VF2.
I've written a high-level overview of VF2 as applied to chemistry - where it is used extensively. The post touches on the differences between VF2 and Ullmann. There is also a from-scratch implementation of VF2 written in Java that might be helpful.
A very similar problem - graph automorphism - can be solved by saucy, which is available in source code. This finds all symmetries of a graph. If you have two graphs, join them into one and any isomorphism can be discovered as an automorphism of the join.
Disclaimer: I am one of co-authors of saucy.
There are algorithms to do this -- however, I have not had cause to seriously investigate them as of yet. I believe Donald Knuth is either writing or has written on this subject in his Art of Computing series during his second pass at (re)writing them.
As for a simple way to do something that might work in practice on small graphs, I would recommend counting degrees, then for each vertex, also note the set of degrees for those vertexes that are adjacent. This will then give you a set of potential vertex isomorphisms for each point. Then just try all those (via brute force, but choosing the vertexes in increasing order of potential vertex isomorphism sets) from this restricted set. Intuitively, most graph isomorphism can be practically computed this way, though clearly there would be degenerate cases that might take a long time.
I recently came across the following paper : http://arxiv.org/abs/0711.2010
This paper proposes "A Polynomial Time Algorithm for Graph Isomorphism"
My project - Griso - at sf.net: http://sourceforge.net/projects/griso/ with this description:
Griso is a graph isomorphism testing utility written in C++. It is based on my own POLYNOMIAL-TIME (in this point the salt of the project) algorithm. See Griso's sample input/output on http://funkybee.narod.ru/graphs.htm page.
nauty and Traces
nauty and Traces are programs for computing automorphism groups of graphs and digraphs [*]. They can also produce a canonical label. They are written in a portable subset of C, and run on a considerable number of different systems.
AutGroupGraph command in GRAPE's package of GAP.
bliss: another symmetry and canonical labeling program.
conauto: a graph ismorphism package.
As for heuristics: i've been fantasising about a modified Ullmann's algorithm, where you don't only use breadth first search but mix it with depth first search the way, that first you use breadth first search intensively, than you set a limit for breadth analysis and go deeper after checking a few neighbours, and you lower the breadh every step at some amount. This is practically how i find my way on a map: first locate myself with breadth first search, then search the route with depth first search - largely, and this is the best evolution of my brain has ever invented. :) On the long term some intelligence may be added for increasing breadth first search neighbour count at critical vertexes - for example where there are a large number of neighbouring vertexes with the same edge count. Like checking your actual route sometimes with the car (without a gps).
I've found out that the algorithm belongs in the category of k-dimension Weisfeiler-Lehman algorithms, and it fails with regular graphs. For more here:
http://dabacon.org/pontiff/?p=4148
Original post follows:
I've worked on the problem to find isomorphic graphs in a database of graphs (containing chemical compositions).
In brief, the algorithm creates a hash of a graph using the power iteration method. There might be false positive hash collisions but the probability of that is exceedingly small (i didn't had any such collisions with tens of thousands of graphs).
The way the algorithm works is this:
Do N (where N is the radius of the graph) iterations. On each iteration and for each node:
Sort the hashes (from the previous step) of the node's neighbors
Hash the concatenated sorted hashes
Replace node's hash with newly computed hash
On the first step, a node's hash is affected by the direct neighbors of it. On the second step, a node's hash is affected by the neighborhood 2-hops away from it. On the Nth step a node's hash will be affected by the neighborhood N-hops around it. So you only need to continue running the Powerhash for N = graph_radius steps. In the end, the graph center node's hash will have been affected by the whole graph.
To produce the final hash, sort the final step's node hashes and concatenate them together. After that, you can compare the final hashes to find if two graphs are isomorphic. If you have labels, then add them (on the first step) in the internal hashes that you calculate for each node.
There is more background here:
https://plus.google.com/114866592715069940152/posts/fmBFhjhQcZF
You can find the source code of it here:
https://github.com/madgik/madis/blob/master/src/functions/aggregate/graph.py

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