Question

Given an undirected graph, I want to generate all subgraphs which are trees of size N, where size refers to the number of edges in the tree.

I am aware that there are a lot of them (exponentially many at least for graphs with constant connectivity) – but that’s fine, as I believe the number of nodes and edges makes this tractable for at least smallish values of N (say 10 or less).

The algorithm should be memory-efficient – that is, it shouldn’t need to have all graphs or some large subset of them in memory at once, since this is likely to exceed available memory even for relatively small graphs. So something like DFS is desirable.

Here’s what I’m thinking, in pseudo-code, given the starting graph graph and desired length N:

Pick any arbitrary node, root as a starting point and call alltrees(graph, N, root)

alltrees(graph, N, root)
 given that node root has degree M, find all M-tuples with integer, non-negative values whose values sum to N (for example, for 3 children and N=2, you have (0,0,2), (0,2,0), (2,0,0), (0,1,1), (1,0,1), (1,1,0), I think)
 for each tuple (X1, X2, ... XM) above
   create a subgraph "current" initially empty
   for each integer Xi in X1...XM (the current tuple)
    if Xi is nonzero
     add edge i incident on root to the current tree
     add alltrees(graph with root removed, N-1, node adjacent to root along edge i)
   add the current tree to the set of all trees
 return the set of all trees

This finds only trees containing the chosen initial root, so now remove this node and call alltrees(graph with root removed, N, new arbitrarily chosen root), and repeat until the size of the remaining graph < N (since no trees of the required size will exist).

I forgot also that each visited node (each root for some call of alltrees) needs to be marked, and the set of children considered above should only be the adjacent unmarked children. I guess we need to account for the case where no unmarked children exist, yet depth > 0, this means that this “branch” failed to reach the required depth, and cannot form part of the solution set (so the whole inner loop associated with that tuple can be aborted).

So will this work? Any major flaws? Any simpler/known/canonical way to do this?

One issue with the algorithm outlined above is that it doesn’t satisfy the memory-efficient requirement, as the recursion will hold large sets of trees in memory.

Answer 1

This needs an amount of memory that is proportional to what is required to store the graph. It will return every subgraph that is a tree of the desired size exactly once.

Keep in mind that I just typed it into here. There could be bugs. But the idea is that you walk the nodes one at a time, for each node searching for all trees that include that node, but none of the nodes that were searched previously. (Because those have already been exhausted.) That inner search is done recursively by listing edges to nodes in the tree, and for each edge deciding whether or not to include it in your tree. (If it would make a cycle, or add an exhausted node, then you can’t include that edge.) If you include it your tree then the used nodes grow, and you have new possible edges to add to your search.

To reduce memory use, the edges that are left to look at is manipulated in place by all of the levels of the recursive call rather than the more obvious approach of duplicating that data at each level. If that list was copied, your total memory usage would get up to the size of the tree times the number of edges in the graph.

def find_all_trees(graph, tree_length):
    exhausted_node = set([])
    used_node = set([])
    used_edge = set([])
    current_edge_groups = []

    def finish_all_trees(remaining_length, edge_group, edge_position):
        while edge_group < len(current_edge_groups):
            edges = current_edge_groups[edge_group]
            while edge_position < len(edges):
                edge = edges[edge_position]
                edge_position += 1
                (node1, node2) = nodes(edge)
                if node1 in exhausted_node or node2 in exhausted_node:
                    continue
                node = node1
                if node1 in used_node:
                    if node2 in used_node:
                        continue
                    else:
                        node = node2
                used_node.add(node)
                used_edge.add(edge)
                edge_groups.append(neighbors(graph, node))
                if 1 == remaining_length:
                    yield build_tree(graph, used_node, used_edge)
                else:
                    for tree in finish_all_trees(remaining_length -1
                                                , edge_group, edge_position):
                        yield tree
                edge_groups.pop()
                used_edge.delete(edge)
                used_node.delete(node)
            edge_position = 0
            edge_group += 1

    for node in all_nodes(graph):
        used_node.add(node)
        edge_groups.append(neighbors(graph, node))
        for tree in finish_all_trees(tree_length, 0, 0):
            yield tree
        edge_groups.pop()
        used_node.delete(node)
        exhausted_node.add(node)