I have a non-directed graph that represents the connectivity between regions of a map. I'd like to identify groups of nodes (regions) that could be removed without creating graph partitions.
What I have tried:
Walking the tree (BFS, DFS...), storing the depths and selecting the nodes with the higher depth (O(n)). Once calculated, I can update the depths in O(~1) on each removal-addition by checking the depth of neighbour nodes (connectivity does not exceed a certain threshold)
Is there a cheaper way to do this? Also finding graph literature is also very hard if you don't know the academical term for the problem. My graphs are between 200 and 500 nodes.
The problem you are solving can be reduced to bridge finding problem in graph.
Algorithm :-
calculate all bridges in the graph using tarjan's method.
then remove a node which does not have bridge as a edge.
Then re-evaluate the bridges in subgraph of the removed node partitioned by bridges.
Continue doing 2 & 3 until there is no node to remove.
You want to find nodes which are not articulation points. Cf. this Wikipedia page for some algorithms allowing to solve the problem of detecting articulation points. See also this page. Finally, note some of these algorithms are already implemented in tools such as igraph.
PS: this is very similar to the problem identified by Vikram, but not exactly the same thing, since the focus is on nodes, and not links.
Related
I have a complete, weighted, undirected graph. The edge weights are the cost of a connection between two nodes, so the minimum spanning tree is the subset of the edges with the lowest total cost such that the graph remains connected.
The MST must be connected at all times, but unfortunately the connections aren't very reliable, so I would like to add redundancy to this graph/network.
Is it possible to compute a subset of edges such that the total edge cost is minimised and edge-connectivity is over a certain minimum?
I can see how it would be possible by bruteforcing, but I was looking for something more practical. I haven't been able to find much about this problem, I think mainly because I don't posses the vocabulary necessary to search.
My current idea is:
Compute the MST
While the it is still below a certain connectivity
Find a node most below that connectivity
Activate that node's edge with the lowest weight
The reason I don't find all the nodes below a certain connectivity all at once is because activating an edge may give another one enough connectivity.
I'm pretty sure this does not yield 100% provably optimal networks, because with this method, it is possible to over-connect nodes (e.g. you activate k edges for a node, then another node activates more shared edges, making some of those k redundant). I hope that makes sense.
Any tips would be much appreciated!
The Wikipedia article on edge connected graphs ends with, A related problem: finding the minimum k-edge-connected spanning subgraph of G (that is: select as few as possible edges in G that your selection is k-edge-connected) is NP-hard for k >= 2. They then cite a 1979 paper that shows it.
Therefore I'd suggest taking a greedy approach, and tip-toeing away.
I came across this problem at a coding site and I have no idea on how to solve it. The editorial is not available nor was I able to find any related article online. So I am asking this here.
Problem:
You have a graph G that contains N vertices and M edges. The vertices are numbered from 1 through N. Also each node is colored either Black or White. You want to calculate the shortest path from 1 to N such that the difference of black and white nodes is at most 1.
As obvious as it is, applying straight forward Dijkstra's Algorithm will not work. Any help is appreciated. Thank you!
We can consider a modified graph and run Dijkstra on this one:
For each node in the original graph, the modified graph will have multiple meta vertices (theoretically, infinitely many) that each correspond to a different black-white difference. You only need to create the nodes as you explore the graph with Dijkstra. Thus, you won't need infinitely many nodes.
The edges are then pretty simple (you can also create them while exploring). If you are currently at a node with black-white difference d and the original graph has an edge to a white node, then you create an edge to the respective node with black-white difference d-1. If the original graph has an edge to a black node, you create an edge in the modified graph to the respective node with black-white difference d+1. You don't necessarily need to treat them as different nodes. You can also store the Dijkstra variables in the node grouped by black-white difference.
Running Dijkstra in this way will give you the shortest paths to any node with any black-white difference. As soon as you reach the target node with an acceptable black-white difference, you are done.
I am working on an atmospheric simulation for a video game, and a problem I have stumbled into is that I need a cheap (in processing time) way to determine if a graph of nodes in a rectangular grid (each node is connected to up to four neighbours, NSEW) would become partitioned if I removed a particular node.
I have tried searching for ways of detecting if a graph is partitioned but so far I have not found anything that suits my problem. I have not taken advanced math courses and only have basic knowledge of graph theory so it is possible that I just have not been searching with the right terms.
If possible, it would be very very desirable to avoid having to search through the whole graph.
You can find articulation points using a modified depth first search - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biconnected_component. An articulation point of a graph is a node that, if removed, disconnects the graph. Every graph can be split up at the articulation points into biconnected components. If you are lucky, you just need to know whether a point is an articulation point. If not, perhaps splitting the graph up into a tree of biconnected components and analysing them will help.
I have an undirected graph which initially has no edges. Now in every step an edge is added or deleted and one has to check whether the graph has at least one circle. Probably the easiest sufficient condition for that is
connected components + number of edges <= number of nodes.
As the "steps" I mentioned above are executed millions of times, this check has to be really fast. So I wonder what would be a quick way to check the condition depending on the fact that in each step only one edge changes.
Any suggestions?
If you are keen, you can try to implement a fully dynamic graph connectivity data structure like described in "Poly-logarithmic deterministic fully-dynamic graph algorithms I: connectivity and minimum spanning tree" by Jacob Holm, Kristian de Lichtenberg, Mikkel Thorup.
When adding an edge, you check whether the two endpoints are connected. If not, the number of connected components decreases by one. After deleting an edge, check if the two endpoints are stil connected. If not, the number of connected components increases by one. The amortized runtime of edge insertion and deletion would be O(log^2 n), but I can imagine the constant factor is quite high.
There are newer result with better bounds. There is also an experimental evaluation of some of the dynamic connectivity algorithms that considers implementation details as well. There is also a Javascript implementation. I have no idea how good it is.
I guess in practice you can have it much easier by maintaining a spanning forest. You get edge additions and non-tree edge deletions (almost) for free. For tree edge deletions you could just use "brute force" in the form of BFS or DFS to check whether the end points are still connected. Especially if the number of nodes is bounded, maybe that works well enough in practice, BFS and DFS are both O(n^2) for dense graphs and you can charge some of that work to the operations where you got lucky and didn't have a lot to do.
I suggest you label all the nodes. Use integers, that's easiest.
At any point, your graph will be divided into a number of disjoint subgraphs. Initially, each node is in its own subgraph.
Maintain the condition that each subgraph has a unique label, and all the nodes in the subgraph carry that label. Initially, just give each node a unique label. If your problem includes adding nodes, you might want to maintain a variable to hold the next available label.
If and only if a new edge would connect two nodes with identical labels, then the edge would create a cycle.
Whenever you add an edge, you will connect two previously disjoint subgraphs. You must relabel one of the subgraphs to match the other, which will require visiting all the nodes of one subgraph. This is the highest computatonal burden in this scheme.
If you don't mind allocating more space, you should also maintain a list of labels in use, associated with a count of the nodes carrying that label. This will allow you to choose the smaller subgraph when relabeling.
If you know which two nodes are being connected by the new edge, you could use some sort of path finding algorithm to detect an alternative path between the two nodes. In other words, if a path exists which connects the two nodes of your new edge before you add the new edge, adding the new edge will create a circle.
Your problem then reduces to finding the paths between two given nodes.
I have a graph that starts off with a single, root node. Nodes are added one by one to the graph. At node creation time, they have to be linked either to the root node, or to another node, by a single edge. Edges can also be created and deleted (one by one, between any two nodes). Nodes can be deleted one at a time. Node and edge creation, deletion operations can happen in any arbitrary order.
OK, so here's my question: When an edge is deleted, is it possible do determine, in constant time (i.e. with an O(1) algorithm), if doing this will divide the graph into two disjoint subgraphs? If it will, then which side of the edge will the root node belong?
I'm willing to maintain, within reasonable limits, any additional data structure that can facilitate the derivation of this information.
Maybe it is not possible to do it in O(1), if so any pointers to literature will be appreciated.
Edit: The graph is a directed graph.
Edit 2: OK, maybe I can restrict the case to deletion of edges from the root node. [Edit 3: not, actually] Also, no edge lands into the root node.
To speed things up a little over the obvious O(|V|+|E|) solution, you could keep a spanning tree which is fairly easy to update as the graph is changed.
If an edge not in the spanning tree is deleted, then the graph isn't disconnected and do nothing. If an edge in the spanning tree is deleted, then you must try to find a new path between those two vertices (if you find one, use it to update the spanning tree, otherwise the graph is disconnected).
So, best case O(1), worst-case O(|V|+|E|), but fairly simple to implement anyway.
Is this a directed graph? The below assumes undirected.
What you are looking for is whether the given edge is a Bridge in the graph. I believe this can be found using a traversal looking for cycles containing that edge and would be O(|V| + |E|).
O(1) is too much to ask.
You might find that looking to maintain 2-edge connected components in dynamic graphs could be useful to you.
Eppstein et al have a paper on this: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/pubs/EppGalIta-TR-93-20.pdf
which can maintain 2-edge connected components, in a graph of n nodes where edge insertions and deletions are allowed. It has O(sqrt(n)) time per update and O(log n) time per query.
So any time you delete, you can query in O(logn) to determine if the number of 2-edge connected components has changed. I suppose it can also tell you which component a specific node is in.
This paper is more general and applies to other graph problems, not only 2 edge connected components.
I suggest you look for bridges and dynamic 2-edge connectivity to get you started.
Hope that helps.
as said by Moron just before, you are actually looking for a Bridge in your graph.
Now a Bridge is an edge that has the described attribute and also originates and ends up in Cut Vertexes. Cut vertex is exactly what a Bridge is, but in a vertex (node) edition.
So the only way (though quite bending the initial data structure hypothesis) I can think of, to get a O(1) complexity for this, is if you first check every node in your graph if it is a Cut Vertex and then simply in constant time checking if the edge you want to delete is a attached to one of those two.
Finding if a node in a graph is a Cut Vertex takes O(m+n) where m = # edges and n= # nodes.
Cheers