It has been previously shown by the authors that a directed graph on a linearly ordered set of edges (ordered graph) with adjacent unique source and sink (bipolar digraph) has a unique fully optimal spanning tree, that satisfies a simple criterion on fundamental cycle/cocycle directions. This result yields, for any ordered graph, a canonical bijection between bipolar orientations and spanning trees with internal activity 1 and external activity 0 in the sense of the Tutte polynomial. This bijection can be extended to all orientations and all spanning trees, yielding the active bijection, presented for graphs in a companion paper. In this paper, we specifically address the problem of the computation of the fully optimal spanning tree of an ordered bipolar digraph. In contrast with the inverse mapping, built by a straightforward single pass over the edge set, the direct computation is not easy and had previously been left aside. We give two independent constructions. The first one is a deletion/contraction recursion, involving an exponential number of minors. It is structurally significant but it is efficient only for building the whole bijection (i.e. all images) at once. The second one is more complicated and is the main contribution of the paper. It involves just one minor for each edge of the resulting spanning tree, and it is a translation and an adaptation in the case of graphs, in terms of weighted cocycles, of a general geometrical linear programming type algorithm, which allows for a polynomial time complexity.
The number of spanning trees in a class of directed circulant graphs with generators depending linearly on the number of vertices $βn$, and in the $n$-th and $(n-1)$-th power graphs of the $βn$-cycle are evaluated as a product of $\lceilβ/2\rceil-1$ terms.
Given a tournament T, let h(T) be the smallest integer k such that every arc-coloring of T with k or more colors produces at least one out-directed spanning tree of T with no pair of arcs with the same color. In this paper we give the exact value of h(T).
We generalize a theorem of Knuth relating the oriented spanning trees of a directed graph G and its directed line graph LG. The sandpile group is an abelian group associated to a directed graph, whose order is the number of oriented spanning trees rooted at a fixed vertex. In the case when G is regular of degree k, we show that the sandpile group of G is isomorphic to the quotient of the sandpile group of LG by its k-torsion subgroup. As a corollary we compute the sandpile groups of two families of graphs widely studied in computer science, the de Bruijn graphs and Kautz graphs.
The line graph LG of a directed graph G has a vertex for every edge of G and an edge for every path of length 2 in G. In 1967, Knuth used the Matrix-Tree Theorem to prove a formula for the number of spanning trees of LG, and he asked for a bijective proof. In this paper, we give a bijective proof of a generating function identity due to Levine which generalizes Knuth's formula. As a result of this proof we find a bijection between binary de Bruijn sequences of degree n and binary sequences of length 2^{n-1}. Finally, we determine the critical groups of all the Kautz graphs and de Bruijn graphs…
We describe a general approach of determining the distribution of spanning subgraphs in the random graph $\G(n,p)$. In particular, we determine the distribution of spanning subgraphs of certain given degree sequences, which is a generalisation of the $d$-factors, of spanning triangle-free subgraphs, of (directed) Hamilton cycles and of spanning subgraphs that are isomorphic to a collection of vertex disjoint (directed) triangles.
Networks with a high degree of symmetry are useful models for parallel processor networks. In earlier papers, we defined several global communication tasks (universal exchange, universal broadcast, universal summation) that can be critical tasks when complex algorithms are mapped to parallel machines. We showed that utilizing the symmetry can make network optimization a tractable problem. In particular, we showed that Cayley graphs have the desirable property that certain routing schemes starting from a single node can be transferred to all nodes in a way that does not introduce conflicts. In …
A subgraph of an edge-coloured graph is called rainbow if all its edges have different colours. The problem of finding rainbow subgraphs goes back to the work of Euler on transversals in Latin squares and was extensively studied since then. In this paper we consider two related questions concerning rainbow subgraphs of complete, edge-coloured graphs and digraphs. In the first part, we show that every properly edge-coloured complete directed graph contains a directed rainbow cycle of length $n-O(n^{4/5})$. This is motivated by an old problem of Hahn and improves a result of Gyarfas and Sarkozy.…
In this article, Temperley's bijection between spanning trees of the square grid on the one hand, and perfect matchings (also known as dimer coverings) of the square grid on the other, is extended to the setting of general planar directed (and undirected) graphs, where edges carry nonnegative weights that induce a weighting on the set of spanning trees. We show that the weighted, directed spanning trees (often called arborescences) of any planar graph G can be put into a one-to-one weight-preserving correspondence with the perfect matchings of a related planar graph H. One special case of this…
In 2001, Komlós, Sárközy and Szemerédi proved that, for each $α>0$, there is some $c>0$ and $n_0$ such that, if $n\geq n_0$, then every $n$-vertex graph with minimum degree at least $(1/2+α)n$ contains a copy of every $n$-vertex tree with maximum degree at most $cn/\log n$. We prove the corresponding result for directed graphs. That is, for each $α>0$, there is some $c>0$ and $n_0$ such that, if $n\geq n_0$, then every $n$-vertex directed graph with minimum semi-degree at least $(1/2+α)n$ contains a copy of every $n$-vertex oriented tree whose underlying maximum degree is at most $cn/\log n$. …
The active bijection forms a package of results studied by the authors in a series of papers in oriented matroids. The present paper is intended to state the main results in the particular case, and more widespread language, of graphs. We associate any directed graph, defined on a linearly ordered set of edges, with one particular of its spanning trees, which we call its active spanning tree. For any graph on a linearly ordered set of edges, this yields a surjective mapping from orientations onto spanning trees, which preserves activities (for orientations in the sense of Las Vergnas, for span…
Mader proved that every strongly $k$-connected $n$-vertex digraph contains a strongly $k$-connected spanning subgraph with at most $2kn - 2k^2$ edges, where the equality holds for the complete bipartite digraph ${DK}_{k,n-k}$. For dense strongly $k$-connected digraphs, this upper bound can be significantly improved. More precisely, we prove that every strongly $k$-connected $n$-vertex digraph $D$ contains a strongly $k$-connected spanning subgraph with at most $kn + 800k(k+\overlineΔ(D))$ edges, where $\overlineΔ(D)$ denotes the maximum degree of the complement of the underlying undirected gra…
We consider two types of random networks grown in blocks. Hooking networks are grown from a set of graphs as blocks, each with a labelled vertex called a hook. At each step in the growth of the network, a vertex called a latch is chosen from the hooking network and a copy of one of the blocks is attached by fusing its hook with the latch. Bipolar networks are grown from a set of directed graphs as blocks, each with a single source and a single sink. At each step in the growth of the network, an arc is chosen and is replaced with a copy of one of the blocks. Using Pólya urns, we prove normal li…
If $G$ is a strongly connected finite directed graph, the set $\mathcal{T}G$ of rooted directed spanning trees of $G$ is naturally equipped with a structure of directed graph: there is a directed edge from any spanning tree to any other obtained by adding an outgoing edge at its root vertex and deleting the outgoing edge of the endpoint. Any Schrödinger operator on $G$, for example the Laplacian, can be lifted canonically to $\mathcal{T}G$. We show that the determinant of such a lifted Schrödinger operator admits a remarkable factorization into a product of determinants of the restrictions of …
Let $D$ be a connected weighted digraph. The relation between the vertex weighted complexity (with a fixed root) of the line digraph of $D$ and the edge weighted complexity (with a fixed root) of $D$ has been given in (L. Levine, Sandpile groups and spanning trees of directed line graphs, J. Combin. Theory Ser. A 118 (2011) 350-364) and, independently, in (S. Sato, New proofs for Levine's theorems, Linear Algebra Appl. 435 (2011) 943-952). In this paper, we obtain a relation between the vertex weighted complexity of the middle digraph of $D$ and the edge weighted complexity of $D$. Particularl…
For a directed graph G on vertices {0,1,...,n}, a G-parking function is an n-tuple (b_1,...,b_n) of non-negative integers such that, for every non-empty subset U of {1,...,n}, there exists a vertex j in U for which there are more than b_j edges going from j to G-U. We construct a family of bijective maps between the set P_G of G-parking functions and the set T_G of spanning trees of G rooted at 0, thus providing a combinatorial proof of |P_G| = |T_G|.
Let $G$ be a simple strongly connected weighted directed graph. Let $\mathcal{G}$ denote the spanning tree graph of $G$. That is, the vertices of $\mathcal{G}$ consist of the directed rooted spanning trees on $G$, and the edges of $\mathcal{G}$ consist of pairs of trees $(t_i, t_j)$ such that $t_j$ can be obtained from $t_i$ by adding the edge from the root of $t_i$ to the root of $t_j$ and deleting the outgoing edge from the root of $t_j$. A formula for the ratio of the sum of the weights of the directed rooted spanning trees on $\mathcal{G}$ to the sum of the weights of the directed rooted s…
As a generalization of the Edmonds arborescence packing theorem, Kamiyama--Katoh--Takizawa (2009) gave a good characterization of directed graphs that contain arc-disjoint arborescences spanning the set of vertices reachable from each root. Fortier--Király--Léonard--Szigeti--Talon (2018) asked whether the result can be extended to mixed graphs by allowing both directed arcs and undirected edges. In this paper, we solve this question by developing a polynomial-time algorithm for finding a collection of edge and arc-disjoint arborescences spanning the set of vertices reachable from each root in …
A strongly connected graph is strongly biconnected if after ignoring the direction of its edges we have an undirected graph with no articulation points. A 3-vertex strongly biconnected graph is a strongly biconnected digraph that has the property that deleting any two vertices in this graph leaves a strongly binconnected subgraph. Jaberi [11] presented approximation algorithms for minimum cardinality 2-vertex strongly biconnected directed subgraph problem. We will focus in this paper on polynomial time algorithms which we have implemented for producing spanning subgraphs that are 3-vertex stro…
Generalizing well-known results of Erdős and Lovász, we show that every graph $G$ contains a spanning $k$-partite subgraph $H$ with $λ(H)\geq \lceil{}\frac{k-1}{k}λ(G)\rceil$, where $λ(G)$ is the edge-connectivity of $G$. In particular, together with a well-known result due to Nash-Williams and Tutte, this implies that every $7$-edge-connected graphs contains a spanning bipartite graph whose edge set decomposes into two edge-disjoint spanning trees. We show that this is best possible as it does not hold for infintely many $6$-edge-connected graphs. For directed graphs, it was shown in [6] that…
We consider weighted, directed graphs with a notion of absorption on the vertices, related to absorbing random walks on graphs. We define a generalized inverse of the graph Laplacian, called the absorption inverse, that reflects both the graph structure as well as the absorption rates on the vertices. Properties of this generalized inverse are presented, including a matrix forest theorem relating this generalized inverse to spanning forests of a related graph, as well as relationships between the absorption inverse and the fundamental matrix of the absorbing random walk. Applications of the ab…
For a weighted directed multigraph, let $f_{ij}$ be the total weight of spanning converging forests that have vertex $i$ in a tree converging to $j$. We prove that $f_{ij} f_{jk} = f_{ik} f_{jj}$ if and only if every directed path from $i$ to $k$ contains $j$ (a graph bottleneck equality). Otherwise, $f_{ij} f_{jk} < f_{ik} f_{jj}$ (a graph bottleneck inequality). In a companion paper (P. Chebotarev, A new family of graph distances, arXiv preprint arXiv:0810.2717}. Submitted), this inequality underlies, by ensuring the triangle inequality, the construction of a new family of graph distances. T…
Subtraction-free computational complexity is the version of arithmetic circuit complexity that allows only three operations: addition, multiplication, and division. We use cluster transformations to design efficient subtraction-free algorithms for computing Schur functions and their skew, double, and supersymmetric analogues, thereby generalizing earlier results by P. Koev. We develop such algorithms for computing generating functions of spanning trees, both directed and undirected. A comparison to the lower bound due to M. Jerrum and M. Snir shows that in subtraction-free computations, "divis…
A shortcut of a directed path $v_1 v_2 \cdots v_n$ is an edge $v_iv_j$ with $j > i+1$. If $j = i+2$ the shortcut is called a hop. If all hops are present, the path is called hop complete, so the path and its hops form a square of a path. We prove that every tournament with $n \ge 4$ vertices has a Hamiltonian path with at least $(4n-10)/7$ hops, and has a hop complete path of order at least $n^{0.295}$. A spanning binary tree of a tournament is a spanning shortcut tree if for every vertex of the tree, all its left descendants are in-neighbors and all its right descendants are out-neighbors. It…
One of the most important questions in matroid optimization is to find disjoint common bases of two matroids. The significance of the problem is well-illustrated by the long list of conjectures that can be formulated as special cases. Bérczi and Schwarcz showed that the problem is hard in general, therefore identifying the borderline between tractable and intractable instances is of interest. In the present paper, we study the special case when one of the matroids is a partition matroid while the other one is a graphic matroid. This setting is equivalent to the problem of packing rainbow spann…
To push a vertex $v$ of a directed graph $\overrightarrow{G}$ is to change the orientations of all the arcs incident with $v$. An oriented graph is a directed graph without any cycle of length at most 2. An oriented clique is an oriented graph whose non-adjacent vertices are connected by a directed 2-path. A push clique is an oriented clique that remains an oriented clique even if one pushes any set of vertices of it. We show that it is NP-complete to decide if an undirected graph is underlying graph of a push clique or not. We also prove that a planar push clique can have at most 8 vertices. …
We consider the random directed graph $\vec{G}(n,p)$ with vertex set $\{1,2,\ldots,n\}$ in which each of the $n(n-1)$ possible directed edges is present independently with probability $p$. We are interested in the strongly connected components of this directed graph. A phase transition for the emergence of a giant strongly connected component is known to occur at $p = 1/n$, with critical window $p= 1/n + λn^{-4/3}$ for $λ\in \mathcal{R}$. We show that, within this critical window, the strongly connected components of $\vec{G}(n,p)$, ranked in decreasing order of size and rescaled by $n^{-1/3}$…
We consider the strongly connected components (SCCs) of a uniform directed graph on $n$ vertices with i.i.d. in- and out-degree pairs distributed as $(D^-,D^+)$, with $\mathbb E[D^+]=\mathbb E[D^-]=μ$. We condition on equal total in- and out-degree. A phase transition for the emergence of a giant SCC is known to occur at the critical value $\mathbb E[D^-D^+] = μ$. We study the model at this critical value and, additionally, require that $\mathbb E[(D^-)^i(D^+)^j]<\infty$ for all $i+j\leq 3$, and for $(i,j)=(1,3)$ and $(i,j)=(3,1)$. We show that, under these conditions, the SCCs ranked by decre…
We introduce a new graph parameter, the hydra number, arising from the minimization problem for Horn formulas in propositional logic. The hydra number of a graph $G=(V,E)$ is the minimal number of hyperarcs of the form $u,v\rightarrow w$ required in a directed hypergraph $H=(V,F)$, such that for every pair $(u, v)$, the set of vertices reachable in $H$ from $\{u, v\}$ is the entire vertex set $V$ if $(u, v) \in E$, and it is $\{u, v\}$ otherwise. Here reachability is defined by forward chaining, a standard marking algorithm. Various bounds are given for the hydra number. We show that the hydra…
