I'm aware of there's a lot of similar topics. But most of them left me some doubts in my case. What I want to do is find perfect matching (or as close to perfect as possible in case there's no perfect matching of course) and then from all of those matchings where you are able to match k out of n vertexes (where k is highest possible), I want to choose the highest possible total weight.
So simply put what I'm saying is following priority:
Match as many vertexes as possible
Because (non weighted) maximum matching in most cases is unambiguous, I want choose the one that have the biggest sum of weights on edges. If there are several of them with same weight it doesn't matter which would be chosen.
I've heard about Ford-Fulkerson algorithm. Is it working in the way I describe it or I need other algorithm?
If you're implementing this yourself, you probably want to use the Hungarian algorithm. Faster algorithms exist but aren't as easy to understand or implement.
Ford-Fulkerson is a maximum flow algorithm; you can use it easily to solve unweighted matching. Turning it into a weighted matcing algorithm requires an additional trick; with that trick, you wind up with the Hungarian algorithm.
You can also use a min-cost flow algorithm to do weighted bipartite matching, but it might not work quite as well. There's also the network simplex method, but it seems to be mostly of historical interest.
Related
I have programmed the minimum Hungarian algorithm for a bipartite graph, with Dijkstra's algorithm to find the minimum cost of a maximum matching. However, I want to use such an algorithm to implement the maximum Hungarian algorithm and don't know if it's correct to just negate the edges, because I don't know if the algorithm will handle it.
My implementation is based on the explanation on the following site: https://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/163/lecture6b.pdf
Given G=(AUB, E), the idea is to label the vertices via an artificial start vertex s which has edges with unsaturated nodes in A, and run Dijkstra's algorithm from s in order to label each vertex, then after labeling each, the edges will be reweighted by their original weight minus the labels of the edge's endpoints.
I have read a lot of articles, and the only I could see is that a minimum Hungarian algorithm can be handled well with maximum cost by negating each edge, however, I am afraid that due to the fact that Dijkstra's algorithm doesn't handle negative edges well, it won't work.
First find the maximum weight in your graph. Then negate all of the weights and add the maximum weight to them. Adding the original maximum to all of the negated values makes them all positive.
You can also use INT_MAX (or whatever is equivalent to it in the programming language you're using) instead of the maximum weight. This skips the step of finding the maximum weight, but could make the first iteration of the Hungarian Algorithm take longer, or cause you to need an extra iteration of the algorithm to get the result. It probably doesn't make much of a difference either way and the performance difference will vary based on the particular weights in your graph.
I'm trying to find a specific algorithm allowing me to match people depending of many criterias. All of them are in the same set, and edges cannot have common vertices. Basically like a dating website but as I said : only one set, so not bi partite.
Despite researches I wasn't able to find this algorithm, almost everything is about bipartite, or allow common vertices. I'm specifically looking for a perfect matching (that can be slow).
It seems the algorithm is supposed to be based on the Ford Furkerson algorithm (which usually is for bipartite matching), but I still don't get how to apply it to that. Do you have any clues ? Thanks
You can find the maximum matching in a non-bipartite graph using the Blossom algorithm (it's quite complicated so I'll not describe it here).
Once you have the maximum matching, checking if it's perfect is very straightforward (just compare its size with the number of vertices in the graph).
I have a set of objects (between 1 and roughly 500). Each object is compatible with certain (zero or more) other objects from that same set.
Can anyone give me some pointers as to how to determine the best way to create pairs of objects that are compatible with each other so that most of the objects in the set are paired?
You're looking for a maximum matching in a general graph. As opposed to the stable marriage problem with which you are familiar, in the maximum matching problem the input graph is not necessarily bipartite. There is no notion of stability (as vertices do not rank their compatible options) and what you're looking for is a subset of the edges of the graph such that no two edges share a common vertex (a.k.a., a matching). You're trying to construct that matching which contains the maximum possible number of edges.
Luckily, the problem of finding a maximum matching in a general graph can be solved in polynomial time using Edmond's matching algorithm (also known as the blossom algorithm because of how it contracts blossoms (odd cycles) into single vertices). The time complexity of Edmond's matching algorithm is O(E•V^2). While not very efficient, I believe this is good enough for the relatively small graphs you're dealing with. You don't even have to implement it from scratch by yourself as there's an open source Java implementation of Edmond's algorithm you can use. However, if you're interested in the state of the art, you can use the most efficient algorithm known for the problem which runs in O(E•sqrt(V)).
If the vertex compatibility of your input is not dichotomous (that is, each vertex has a ranking specifying its preferences among its neighbors), you can add corresponding weights to the edges to accommodate for the preference profile and use the variation of Edmond's algorithm for weighted graphs.
I've been looking for an algorithm to efficiently compute an edit path between two trees, a path that does not have to correspond to shortest edit distance but preferably a relatively short one.
The case is that I have two directory trees, consisting of directories and files, and want to compute a sequence of deletes, inserts and renames that will transform one to the other.
I have tried searching both stackoverflow and the wild web but all I find is algorithms for computing shortest edit distance, but they all have high scaling factors.
So my question is, is there any more efficient way then for example "Zhang and Shasha" when I don't need the optimum distance?
Kind regards
There is the Klein algorithm that performs slightly better than "Zhang and Sasha", however it remains of very high complexity in both space and time for practical purpose.
There is an algorithm here that is in fact an heuristic, since the authors misused the term approximation.
It reduces the problem to a series of maximum weighted cliques for which it exists several approximation and heuristics, even a greedy approach could here perform reasonably well.
What is true for graphs is true for trees, you could therefore use a graph kernel convolution approach.
If you are looking for an off the shelf implementation (of an unspeficied algorithm, I woudl guess Zhang or Klein), you can check here
I am looking for a way to perform a topological sorting on a given directed unweighted graph, that contains cycles. The result should not only contain the ordering of vertices, but also the set of edges, that are violated by the given ordering. This set of edges shall be minimal.
As my input graph is potentially large, I cannot use an exponential time algorithm. If it's impossible to compute an optimal solution in polynomial time, what heuristic would be reasonable for the given problem?
Eades, Lin, and Smyth proposed A fast and effective heuristic for the feedback arc set problem. The original article is behind a paywall, but a free copy is available from here.
There’s an algorithm for topological sorting that builds the vertex order by selecting a vertex with no incoming arcs, recursing on the graph minus the vertex, and prepending that vertex to the order. (I’m describing the algorithm recursively, but you don’t have to implement it that way.) The Eades–Lin–Smyth algorithm looks also for vertices with no outgoing arcs and appends them. Of course, it can happen that all vertices have incoming and outgoing arcs. In this case, select the vertex with the highest differential between incoming and outgoing. There is undoubtedly room for experimentation here.
The algorithms with provable worst-case behavior are based on linear programming and graph cuts. These are neat, but the guarantees are less than ideal (log^2 n or log n log log n times as many arcs as needed), and I suspect that efficient implementations would be quite a project.
Inspired by Arnauds answer and other interesting topological sorting algorithms have I created the cyclic-toposort project and published it on github. cyclic_toposort does exactly what you desire in that it quickly sorts a directed cyclic graph providing the minimal amount of violating edges. It optionally also provides the maximum groupings of nodes that are on the same topological level (and can therefore be activated at the same time) if desired.
If the problem is still relevant to you then I would be happy if you check out my project and let me know what you think!
This project was useful to my own neural network topology research, so I had to create something like this anyway. I am answering your question this late in case anyone else stumbles upon this thread in search for the same question.