Given a graph, we can form a spanning forest by first sorting the edges in some order, and then only keep edges incident to a vertex which is not incident to any previous edge. The resulting forest is dependent on the ordering of the edges, and so we can ask, for example, how likely is it for the process to produce a graph with $k$ trees.
We look at all graphs which can produce at most two trees in this process and determine the probabilities of having either one or two trees. From this we construct infinite families of graphs which are non-isomorphic but produce the same probabilities.
A new 2-parameter family of central structures in trees, called central forests, is introduced. Minieka's $m$-center problem and McMorris's and Reid's central-$k$-tree can be seen as special cases of central forests in trees. A central forest is defined as a forest $F$ of $m$ subtrees of a tree $T$, where each subtree has $k$ nodes, which minimizes the maximum distance between nodes not in $F$ and those in $F$. An $O(n(m+k))$ algorithm to construct such a central forest in trees is presented, where $n$ is the number of nodes in the tree. The algorithm either returns with a central forest, or w…
We consider matrices with entries that are polynomials in $q$ arising from natural $q$-generalisations of two well-known formulas that count: forests on $n$ vertices with $k$ components; and trees on $n+1$ vertices where $k$ children of the root are smaller than the root. We give a combinatorial interpretation of the corresponding statistic on forests and trees and show, via the construction of various planar networks and the Lindström-Gessel-Viennot lemma, that these matrices are coefficientwise totally positive. We also exhibit generalisations of the entries of these matrices to polynomials …
Trees or rooted trees have been generously studied in the literature. A forest is a set of trees or rooted trees. Here we give recurrence relations between the number of some kind of rooted forest with $k$ roots and that with $k+1$ roots on $\{1,2,\ldots,n\}$. Classical formulas for counting various trees such as rooted trees, bipartite trees, tripartite trees, plane trees, $k$-ary plane trees, $k$-edge colored trees follow immediately from our recursive relations.
The theme of this article is the algebraic combinatorics of leaf-labeled rooted binary trees and forests of such trees. The structure of a Hopf operad is defined on the vector spaces spanned by forests of leaf-labeled, rooted, binary trees. An explicit formula for the coproduct and its dual product is given, using a poset on forests.
We consider all spanning trees of a complete simple graph $Γ$ on $n$ vertices that contain a given $m-$forest $F$. We show that the number of such spanning trees, $τ(F)$, doesn't depend on the structure of $F$ and is completely determined by the number of vertices $q_i \, (i=1, ..., m)$ in each connected component of $F$. Specifically, $τ(F) = q_1 q_2 \cdots q_m n^{m-2}$.
While the game chromatic number of a forest is known to be at most 4, no simple criteria are known for determining the game chromatic number of a forest. We first state necessary and sufficient conditions for forests with game chromatic number 2 and then investigate the differences between forests with game chromatic number 3 and 4. In doing so, we present a minimal example of a forest with game chromatic number 4, criteria for determining the game chromatic number of a forest without vertices of degree 3, and an example of a forest with maximum degree 3 and game chromatic number 4.
In evolutionary studies it is common to use phylogenetic trees to represent the evolutionary history of a set of species. However, in case the transfer of genes or other genetic information between the species or their ancestors has occurred in the past, a tree may not provide a complete picture of their history. In such cases,tree-based phylogenetic networks can provide a useful, more refined representation of the species evolution. Such a network is essentially a phylogenetic tree with some arcs added between the tree edges so as to represent reticulate events such as gene transfer. Even so,…
The Gallai graph $Γ(G)$ of a graph $G$ has the edges of $G$ as its vertices and two distinct vertices $e$ and $f$ of $Γ(G)$ are adjacent in $Γ(G)$ if the edges $e$ and $f$ of $G$ are adjacent in $G$ but do not span a triangle in $G$. Clearly, $Γ(G)$ is a subgraph of the line graph of $G$. While line graphs can be recognized efficiently the complexity of recognizing Gallai graphs is unknown. In the present paper we characterize those graphs whose Gallai graphs are forests or trees, respectively.
In this article, we extend Moon's classic formula for counting spanning trees in complete graphs containing a fixed spanning forest to complete bipartite graphs. Let $(X,Y)$ be the bipartition of the complete bipartite graph $K_{m,n}$ with $|X|=m$ and $|Y|=n$. We prove that for any given spanning forest $F$ of $K_{m,n}$ with components $T_1,T_2,\ldots,T_k$, the number of spanning trees in $K_{m,n}$ which contain all edges in $F$ is equal to $$ \frac 1{mn}\left(\prod_{i=1}^k (m_in+n_im)\right) \left (1-\sum_{i=1}^{k}\frac{m_in_i}{m_in+n_im}\right ), $$ where $m_i=|V(T_i)\cap X|$ and $n_i=|V(T_i…
For a loopless multigraph $G$, the fractional arboricity $Arb(G)$ is the maximum of $\frac{|E(H)|}{|V(H)|-1}$ over all subgraphs $H$ with at least two vertices. Generalizing the Nash-Williams Arboricity Theorem, the Nine Dragon Tree Conjecture asserts that if $Arb(G)\le k+\frac{d}{k+d+1}$, then $G$ decomposes into $k+1$ forests with one having maximum degree at most $d$. The conjecture was previously proved for $d=k+1$ and for $k=1$ when $d \le 6$. We prove it for all $d$ when $k \le 2$, except for $(k,d)=(2,1)$.
Lajos Takacs gave a somewhat formidable alternating sum formula for the number of forests of unrooted trees on $n$ labeled vertices. Here we use a weight-reversing involution on suitable tree configurations to give a combinatorial derivation of Takacs' formula.
The Exponential Formula allows one to enumerate any class of combinatorial objects built by choosing a set of connected components and placing a structure on each connected component which depends only on its size. There are multiple variants of this result, including Speicher's result for noncrossing partitions, as well as analogues of the Exponential Formula for series-reduced planar trees and forests. In this paper we use these formulae to give generating functions contracted Grassmannian trees and forests, certain graphs whose vertices are decorated with a helicity. Along the way we enumer…
We study distorted metrics on binary trees in the context of phylogenetic reconstruction. Given a binary tree $T$ on $n$ leaves with a path metric $d$, consider the pairwise distances $\{d(u,v)\}$ between leaves. It is well known that these determine the tree and the $d$ length of all edges. Here we consider distortions $\d$ of $d$ such that for all leaves $u$ and $v$ it holds that $|d(u,v) - \d(u,v)| < f/2$ if either $d(u,v) < M$ or $\d(u,v) < M$, where $d$ satisfies $f \leq d(e) \leq g$ for all edges $e$. Given such distortions we show how to reconstruct in polynomial time a forest $T_1,...,…
Let $\mathcal{D}_0:= \{x + iy \ \vert x, y >0\}$, and let $(L, R)$ be a pair of Möbius transformations corresponding to $\mathrm{SL}_2(\mathbb{N}_0)$ matrices such that $R(\mathcal{D}_0)$ and $L(\mathcal{D}_0)$ are disjoint. Given such a pair (called a left-right pair), we can construct a directed graph $\mathcal{F}(L, R)$ with vertices $\mathcal{D}_0$ and edges $\{(z, R(z))\}_{z \in \mathcal{D}_0} \cup \{(z, L(z))\}_{z \in \mathcal{D}_0}$, which is a collection of infinite binary trees. We answer two questions of Nathanson by classifying all the pairs of elements of $\mathrm{SL}_2(\mathbb{N}_…
The classes of tree permutations and forest permutations were defined by Acan and Hitczenko (2016). We study random permutations of a given length from these classes, and in particular the number of occurrences of a fixed pattern in one of these random permutations. The main results show that the distributions of these numbers are asymptotically normal. The proof uses representations of random tree and forest permutations that enable us to express the number of occurrences of a pattern by a type of $U$-statistics; we then use general limit theorems for the latter.
We investigate the complexity of counting trees, forests and bases of matroids from a parameterized point of view. It turns out that the problems of computing the number of trees and forests with $k$ edges are $\# W[1]$-hard when parameterized by $k$. Together with the recent algorithm for deterministic matrix truncation by Lokshtanov et al. (ICALP 2015), the hardness result for $k$-forests implies $\# W[1]$-hardness of the problem of counting bases of a matroid when parameterized by rank or nullity, even if the matroid is restricted to be representable over a field of characteristic $2$. We c…
We introduce a correspondence between phylogenetic trees and Brauer diagrams, inspired by links between binary trees and matchings described by Diaconis and Holmes (1998). This correspondence gives rise to a range of semigroup structures on the set of phylogenetic trees, and opens the prospect of many applications. We furthermore extend the Diaconis-Holmes correspondence from binary trees to non-binary trees and to forests, showing for instance that the set of all forests is in bijection with the set of partitions of finite sets.
The product dimension of a graph G is defined as the minimum natural number l such that G is an induced subgraph of a direct product of l complete graphs. In this paper we study the product dimension of forests, bounded treewidth graphs and k-degenerate graphs. We show that every forest on n vertices has a product dimension at most 1.441logn+3. This improves the best known upper bound of 3logn for the same due to Poljak and Pultr. The technique used in arriving at the above bound is extended and combined with a result on existence of orthogonal Latin squares to show that every graph on n verti…
Starting from any graph on $\{1, \ldots, n\}$, consider the Markov chain where at each time-step a uniformly chosen vertex is disconnected from all of its neighbors and reconnected to another uniformly chosen vertex. This Markov chain has a stationary distribution whose support is the set of non-empty forests on $\{1, \ldots, n\}$. The random forest corresponding to this stationary distribution has interesting connections with the uniform rooted labeled tree and the uniform attachment tree. We fully characterize its degree distribution, the distribution of its number of trees, and the limit di…
In this work, we expose four bijections each allowing to increase (or decrease) one parameter in either uniform random forests with a fixed number of edges and trees, or quadrangulations with a boundary having a fixed number of faces and a fixed boundary length. In particular, this gives a way to sample a uniform quadrangulation with n + 1 faces from a uniform quadrangulation with n faces or a uniform forest with n+1 edges and p trees from a uniform forest with n edges and p trees.
Reverse search is a convenient method for enumerating structured objects, that can be used both to address theoretical issues and to solve data mining problems. This method has already been successfully developed to handle unordered trees. If the literature proposes solutions to enumerate singletons of trees, we study in this article a more general problem, the enumeration of sets of trees -- forests. Specifically, we mainly study irredundant forests, i.e., where no tree is a subtree of another. By compressing each such forest into a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), we develop a reverse search li…
Given two rooted phylogenetic trees on the same set of taxa X, the Maximum Agreement Forest problem (MAF) asks to find a forest that is, in a certain sense, common to both trees and has a minimum number of components. The Maximum Acyclic Agreement Forest problem (MAAF) has the additional restriction that the components of the forest cannot have conflicting ancestral relations in the input trees. There has been considerable interest in the special cases of these problems in which the input trees are required to be binary. However, in practice, phylogenetic trees are rarely binary, due to uncert…
We prove a generalization of Kirchhoff's matrix-tree theorem in which a large class of combinatorial objects are represented by non-Gaussian Grassmann integrals. As a special case, we show that unrooted spanning forests, which arise as a q \to 0 limit of the Potts model, can be represented by a Grassmann theory involving a Gaussian term and a particular bilocal four-fermion term. We show that this latter model can be mapped, to all orders in perturbation theory, onto the N-vector model at N=-1 or, equivalently, onto the sigma-model taking values in the unit supersphere in R^{1|2}. It follows t…
