We compare our upper bounds on the exponential growth constant $ϕ(Λ)$ characterizing the asymptotic behavior of spanning forests on Archimedean lattices $Λ$ with recently derived upper bounds. Our upper bounds on $ϕ(Λ)$, which are very close to the respective values of $ϕ(Λ)$ that we have calculated, are shown to be significantly better for these lattices than the new upper bounds.
We calculate exponential growth constants $ϕ$ and $σ$ describing the asymptotic behavior of spanning forests and connected spanning subgraphs on strip graphs, with arbitrarily great length, of several two-dimensional lattices, including square, triangular, honeycomb, and certain heteropolygonal Archimedean lattices. By studying the limiting values as the strip widths get large, we infer lower and upper bounds on these exponential growth constants for the respective infinite lattices. Since our lower and upper bounds are quite close to each other, we can infer very accurate approximate values f…
The classical Dodgson identity can be interpreted as a quadratic identity of spanning forest polynomials, where the spanning forests used in each polynomial are defined by how three marked vertices are divided among the component trees. We prove an analogous result with four marked vertices.
We give some insight into Tutte's definition of internally and externally active edges for spanning forests. Namely we prove, that every edge subset can be constructed from the edges of exactly one spanning forest by deleting a unique subset of the internally active edges and adding a unique subset of the externally active edges.
This paper discusses the enumeration for the total number of all rooted spanning forests of the labeled complete tripartite graph. We enumerate the total number by a combinatorial decomposition.
We provide new evidence that spanning forests of graphs satisfy the same negative correlation properties as spanning trees, derived from Lord Rayleigh's monotonicity property for electrical networks. The main result of this paper is that the Rayleigh difference for the spanning forest generating polynomial of a series parallel graph can be expressed as a certain positive sum of monomials times squares of polynomials. We also show that every regular matroid is independent-set-Rayleigh if and only if every basis-Rayleigh binary matroid is also independent-set-Rayleigh.
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…
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, $τ(F) = q_1 q_2 \cdots q_m n^{m-2}$.
A spanning 2-forest separating vertices $u$ and $v$ of an undirected connected graph is a spanning forest with 2 components such that $u$ and $v$ are in distinct components. Aside from their combinatorial significance, spanning 2-forests have an important application to the calculation of resistance distance or effective resistance. The resistance distance between vertices $u$ and $v$ in a graph representing an electrical circuit with unit resistance on each edge is the number of spanning 2-forests separating $u$ and $v$ divided by the number of spanning trees in the graph. There are also well…
We show that if $G$ is a $d$--regular graph on $n$ vertices, then the number of spanning forests $F(G)$ satisfies $F(G)\leq d^n$. The previous best bound due to Kahale and Schulman gave $(d+1/2+O(1/d))^n$. We also have the more precise conjecture that $$F(G)^{1/n}\leq \frac{(d-1)^{d-1}}{(d^2-2d-1)^{d/2-1}}.$$ If this conjecture is true, then the expression on the right hand side is the best possible.
For a fixed positive $ε$, we show the existence of a constant $C_ε$ with the following property: Given a $\pm1$-edge-labeling $c:E(K_n)\to \{ -1,1\}$ of the complete graph $K_n$ with $c(E(K_n))=0$, and a spanning forest $F$ of $K_n$ of maximum degree $Δ$, one can determine in polynomial time an isomorphic copy $F'$ of $F$ in $K_n$ with $|c(E(F'))|\leq \left(\frac{3}{4}+ε\right)Δ+C_ε.$ Our approach is based on the method of conditional expectation.
Let G be a graph with vertex set {1,...,n}. A spanning forest F of G is increasing if the sequence of labels on any path starting at the minimum vertex of a tree of F form an increasing sequence. Hallam and Sagan showed that the generating function ISF(G,t) for increasing spanning forests of G has all nonpositive integral roots. Furthermore they proved that, up to a change of sign, this polynomial equals the chromatic polynomial of G precisely when 1,...,n is a perfect elimination order for G. We give new, purely combinatorial proofs of these results which permit us to generalize them in sever…
For a set of graphs $\mathcal{F}$, the extremal number $ex(n;\mathcal{F})$ is the maximum number of edges in a graph of order $n$ not containing any subgraph isomorphic to some graph in $\mathcal{F}$. If $\mathcal{F}$ contains a graph on $n$ vertices, then we often call the problem a spanning Turán problem. A linear forest is a graph whose connected components are all paths and isolated vertices. In this paper, we let $\mathcal{L}_n^k$ be the set of all linear forests of order $n$ with at least $n-k+1$ edges. We prove that when $n\geq 3k$ and $k\geq 2$, \[ ex(n;\mathcal{L}_n^k)=\binom{n-k+1}{2…
An essential spanning forest of an infinite graph $G$ is a spanning forest of $G$ in which all trees have infinitely many vertices. Let $G_n$ be an increasing sequence of finite connected subgraphs of $G$ for which $\bigcup G_n=G$. Pemantle's arguments imply that the uniform measures on spanning trees of $G_n$ converge weakly to an $\operatorname {Aut}(G)$-invariant measure $μ_G$ on essential spanning forests of $G$. We show that if $G$ is a connected, amenable graph and $Γ\subset \operatorname {Aut}(G)$ acts quasitransitively on $G$, then $μ_G$ is the unique $Γ$-invariant measure on essential…
We study spanning diverging forests of a digraph and related matrices. It is shown that the normalized matrix of out forests of a digraph coincides with the transition matrix in a specific observation model for Markov chains related to the digraph. Expression are given for the Moore-Penrose generalized inverse and the group inverse of the Kirchhoff (Laplacian) matrix. These expressions involve the matrix of maximum out forest of the digraph. Every matrix of out forests with a fixed number of arcs and the normalized matrix of out forests are represented as polynomials in the Kirchhoff matrix; w…
We study rotor walk, a deterministic counterpart of the simple random walk, on infinite transient graphs. We show that the final rotor configuration of the rotor walk follows the law of the wired uniform spanning forest oriented toward infinity (OWUSF) measure when the initial rotor configuration is sampled from OWUSF. This result holds for all graphs for which each tree in the wired spanning forest has one single end almost surely. This answers a question posed in a previous work of the author (Chan 2018).
We present the numbers of spanning forests on the Sierpinski gasket $SG_d(n)$ at stage $n$ with dimension $d$ equal to two, three and four, and determine the asymptotic behaviors. The corresponding results on the generalized Sierpinski gasket $SG_{d,b}(n)$ with $d=2$ and $b=3,4$ are obtained. We also derive the upper bounds of the asymptotic growth constants for both $SG_d$ and $SG_{2,b}$.
In 2001, Brualdi and Hollingsworth proved that an edge-colored balanced complete bipartite graph Kn,n with a color set C = {1,2,3,..., 2n-1} has a heterochromatic spanning tree if the number of edges colored with colors in R is more than |R|^2 /4 for any non-empty subset R \subseteq C, where a heterochromatic spanning tree is a spanning tree whose edges have distinct colors, namely, any color appears at most once. In 2010, Suzuki generalized heterochromatic graphs to f-chromatic graphs, where any color c appears at most f(c). Moreover, he presented a necessary and sufficient condition for grap…
A sharp upper bound on the number of spanning forests of regular graphs
School of Mathematics and Statistics, Qinghai Minzu University（青海民族大学数学与统计学院）；Qinghai Institute of Applied Mathematics（青海省应用数学研究所）；School of Mathematical Sciences, Xiamen University（厦门大学数学科学学院）
We give an explicit combinatorial proof of a weighted version of strong log-concavity for the generating polynomial of increasing spanning forests of a finite simple graph equipped with a total ordering of the vertices. In contrast to similar proofs in the literature, our injection is local in the sense that it proceeds by moving a single edge from one forest to the other. In the particular case of the complete graph, this gives a new combinatorial proof of log-concavity of unsigned Stirling numbers of the first kind where a pair of permutations is transformed into a new pair by breaking a sin…
The matrices of spanning rooted forests are studied as a tool for analysing the structure of digraphs and measuring their characteristics. The problems of revealing the basis bicomponents, measuring vertex proximity, and ranking from preference relations / sports competitions are considered. It is shown that the vertex accessibility measure based on spanning forests has a number of desirable properties. An interpretation for the normalized matrix of out-forests in terms of information dissemination is given. Keywords: Laplacian matrix, spanning forest, matrix-forest theorem, proximity measure,…
Let $F(G)$ be the number of forests of a graph $G$. Similarly let $C(G)$ be the number of connected spanning subgraphs of a connected graph $G$. We bound $F(G)$ and $C(G)$ for regular graphs and for graphs with fixed average degree. Among many other things we study $f_d=\sup_{G\in \mathcal{G}_d}F(G)^{1/v(G)}$, where $\mathcal{G}_d$ is the family of $d$--regular graphs, and $v(G)$ denotes the number of vertices of a graph $G$. We show that $f_3=2^{3/2}$, and if $(G_n)_n$ is a sequence of $3$--regular graphs with length of the shortest cycle tending to infinity, then $\lim_{n\to \infty}F(G_n)^{1…
The number of rooted spanning forests of bicirculant graphs
Yunnan University of Finance and Economics（云南财经大学）；Central South University（中南大学）；Qinghai Nationalities University（青海民族大学）；Qinghai Institute of Applied Mathematics（青海省应用数学研究所）
For a complete graph $K_n$ of order $n$, an edge-labeling $c:E(K_n)\to \{ -1,1\}$ satisfying $c(E(K_n))=0$, and a spanning forest $F$ of $K_n$, we consider the problem to minimize $|c(E(F'))|$ over all isomorphic copies $F'$ of $F$ in $K_n$. In particular, we ask under which additional conditions there is a zero-sum copy, that is, a copy $F'$ of $F$ with $c(E(F'))=0$. We show that there is always a copy $F'$ of $F$ with $|c(E(F'))|\leq Δ(F)+1$, where $Δ(F)$ is the maximum degree of $F$. We conjecture that this bound can be improved to $|c(E(F'))|\leq (Δ(F)-1)/2$ and verify this for $F$ being t…
We propose the reliability constrained k-rooted minimum spanning forest, a relevant optimization problem whose aim is to find a k-rooted minimum cost forest that connects given customers to a number of supply vertices, in such a way that a minimum required reliability on each path between a customer and a supply vertex is satisfied and the cost is a minimum. The reliability of an edge is the probability that no failure occurs on that edge, whereas the reliability of a path is the product of the reliabilities of the edges in such path. The problem has relevant applications in the design of netw…
We study rotor walks on transient graphs with initial rotor configuration sampled from the oriented wired uniform spanning forest (OWUSF) measure. We show that the expected number of visits to any vertex by the rotor walk is at most equal to the expected number of visits by the simple random walk. In particular, this implies that this walk is transient. When these two numbers coincide, we show that the rotor configuration at the end of the process also has the law of OWUSF. Furthermore, if the graph is vertex-transitive, we show that the average number of visits by $n$ consecutive rotor walks …
The generating function for spanning forests on a lattice is related to the q-state Potts model in a certain q -> 0 limit, and extends the analogous notion for spanning trees, or dense self-avoiding branched polymers. Recent works have found a combinatorial perturbative equivalence also with the (quadratic action) O(n) model in the limit n -> -1, the expansion parameter t counting the number of components in the forest. We give a random-matrix formulation of this model on the ensemble of degree-k random planar lattices. For k = 3, a correspondence is found with the Kostov solution of the loop-…
A heterochromatic (or rainbow) graph is an edge-colored graph whose edges have distinct colors, that is, where each color appears at most once. In this paper, I propose a $(g,f)$-chromatic graph as an edge-colored graph where each color $c$ appears at least $g(c)$ times and at most $f(c)$ times. I also present a necessary and sufficient condition for edge-colored graphs (not necessary to be proper) to have a $(g,f)$-chromatic spanning tree. Using this criterion, I show that an edge-colored complete graph $G$ has a spanning tree with a color probability distribution `similar' to that of $G$. Mo…
For a graph G, let f_{ij} be the number of spanning rooted forests in which vertex j belongs to a tree rooted at i. In this paper, we show that for a path, the f_{ij}'s can be expressed as the products of Fibonacci numbers; for a cycle, they are products of Fibonacci and Lucas numbers. The {\em doubly stochastic graph matrix} is the matrix F=(f_{ij})/f, where f is the total number of spanning rooted forests of G and n is the number of vertices in G. F provides a proximity measure for graph vertices. By the matrix forest theorem, F^{-1}=I+L, where L is the Laplacian matrix of G. We show that fo…
We consider three probability measures on subsets of edges of a given finite graph $G$, namely those which govern, respectively, a uniform forest, a uniform spanning tree, and a uniform connected subgraph. A conjecture concerning the negative association of two edges is reviewed for a uniform forest, and a related conjecture is posed for a uniform connected subgraph. The former conjecture is verified numerically for all graphs $G$ having eight or fewer vertices, or having nine vertices and no more than eighteen edges, using a certain computer algorithm which is summarised in this paper. Negati…
As a follow-up of previous work of the authors, we analyse the statistical mechanics model of random spanning forests on random planar graphs. Special emphasis is given to the analysis of the critical behaviour. Exploiting an exact relation with a model of O(-2)-loops and dimers, previously solved by Kostov and Staudacher, we identify critical and multicritical loci, and find them consistent with recent results of Bousquet-Mélou and Courtiel. This is also consistent with the KPZ relation, and the Berker-Kadanoff phase in the anti-ferromagnetic regime of the Potts Model on periodic lattices, pr…
This paper is a contribution to the problem of counting geometric graphs on point sets. More concretely, we look at the maximum numbers of non-crossing spanning trees and forests. We show that the so-called double chain point configuration of N points has Omega(12.52^N) non-crossing spanning trees and Omega(13.61^N) non-crossing forests. This improves the previous lower bounds on the maximum number of non-crossing spanning trees and of non-crossing forests among all sets of N points in general position given by Dumitrescu, Schulz, Sheffer and Tóth. Our analysis relies on the tools of analytic …
Given a hypergraph G, we introduce a Grassmann algebra over the vertex set, and show that a class of Grassmann integrals permits an expansion in terms of spanning hyperforests. Special cases provide the generating functions for rooted and unrooted spanning (hyper)forests and spanning (hyper)trees. All these results are generalizations of Kirchhoff's matrix-tree theorem. Furthermore, we show that the class of integrals describing unrooted spanning (hyper)forests is induced by a theory with an underlying OSP(1|2) supersymmetry.
We introduce a graph partitioning problem motivated by computational topology and propose two algorithms that produce approximate solutions. Specifically, given a weighted, undirected graph $G$ and a positive integer $k$, we desire to find $k$ disjoint trees within $G$ such that each vertex of $G$ is contained in one of the trees and the weight of the largest tree is as small as possible. We are unable to find this problem in the graph partitioning literature, but we show that the problem is NP-complete. We then propose two approximation algorithms, one that uses a spectral clustering approach…
In this paper, we study the graph polynomial that counts spanning rooted forests f_g of a given graph. This polynomial has a remarkable reciprocity property. We give a new bijective proof for this theorem which has Prufer coding as a special case.
Let $\mathcal{F}$ be a family of graphs. The Turán number $ex(n;\mathcal{F})$ is defined to be the maximum number of edges in a graph of order $n$ that is $\mathcal{F}$-free. In 1959, Erdős and Gallai determined the Turán number of $M_{k+1}$ (a matching of size $k+1$) as follows: \[ ex(n;M_{k+1})= \max\left\{\binom{2k+1}{2},\binom{n}{2}-\binom{n-k}{2}\right\}. \] Since then, there has been a lot of research on Turán number of linear forests. A linear forest is a graph whose connected components are all paths or isolated vertices. Let $\mathcal{L}_{n,k}$ be the family of all linear forests of o…
Let $\mathcal{F}$ be a family of graphs. A graph $G$ is called \textit{$\mathcal{F}$-free} if for any $F\in \mathcal{F}$, there is no subgraph of $G$ isomorphic to $F$. Given a graph $T$ and a family of graphs $\mathcal{F}$, the generalized Turán number of $\mathcal{F}$ is the maximum number of copies of $T$ in an $\mathcal{F}$-free graph on $n$ vertices, denoted by $ex(n,T,\mathcal{F})$. A linear forest is a graph whose connected components are all paths or isolated vertices. Let $\mathcal{L}_{n,k}$ be the family of all linear forests of order $n$ with $k$ edges and $K^*_{s,t}$ a graph obtain…
Fisher established an explicit correspondence between the 2-dimensional Ising model defined on a graph $G$ and the dimer model defined on a decorated version $\GD$ of this graph \cite{Fisher}. In this paper we explicitly relate the dimer model associated to the critical Ising model and critical cycle rooted spanning forests (CRSFs). This relation is established through characteristic polynomials, whose definition only depends on the respective fundamental domains, and which encode the combinatorics of the model. We first show a matrix-tree type theorem establishing that the dimer characteristi…
In this paper we consider the original and different generalizations of Postnikov-Shapiro algebra which enumerate forests and trees of graphs, see~\cite{PSh}. Our main result is that the algebra counting forests depends only on graphical matroid and converse. Also we generalize algebras for a hypergraph. For this, we define spanning forests and trees of a hypergraph and the corresponding "hypergraphical" matroid. We present $3$ different equivalent definitions of spanning forests and trees, which can be read independently from other parts of the paper.
We prove that the wired uniform spanning forest exhibits mean-field behaviour on a very large class of graphs, including every transitive graph of at least quintic volume growth and every bounded degree nonamenable graph. Several of our results are new even in the case of $\mathbb{Z}^d$, $d\geq 5$. In particular, we prove that every tree in the forest has spectral dimension $4/3$ and walk dimension $3$ almost surely, and that the critical exponents governing the intrinsic diameter and volume of the past of a vertex in the forest are $1$ and $1/2$ respectively. (The past of a vertex in the unif…
