ArangoDB Graph-Traversal: Exclude Edges - graph

I'm executing a query similar to:
FOR v, e IN 1..10 ANY #start GRAPH #graph
FILTER e.someCondition
RETURN v
What I expected to happen was that if e.someCondition was false, then the edge in question wouldn't be traversed (and transitively, all other vertexes and edges reachable solely through e would never be visited).
However, it seems that what happens is that e is merely skipped and then traversal continues down that path.
So, how can I set boundaries on graph-traversal by edge-properties using AQL?

The query supports v, e and p, where p is the path it takes.
The ArangoDB documentation shows some examples.
I have used this to exclude specific nodes at specified depths in the path but you have to specify depth of nodes e.g. p.vertices[0].something != 'value').
Another thing you might want to look at is working with 'Custom Visitor' functions which are evaluated as the query traverses down a path.
This good blog post and this ArangoDB guide show some real world examples of it and it's well worth the read and effort to get a sample working. I've used these functions to summarise data in a path, aggregated by properties on the vertices in the path, but you can also use it to have custom paths followed.
This is worth the effort because it gives you huge flexibility over the computation it follows when traversing the graph. You can exclude branches, only include branches that meet specific requirements, or aggregate data about the paths it took.
I hope that helps.

Related

Union-Find algorithm and determining whether an edge belongs to a cycle in a graph

I'm reading a book about algorithms ("Data Structures and Algorithms in C++") and have come across the following exercise:
Ex. 20. Modify cycleDetectionDFS() so that it could determine whether a particular edge is part of a cycle in an undirected graph.
In the chapter about graphs, the book reads:
Let us recall from a preceding section that depth-first search
guaranteed generating a spanning tree in which no elements of edges
used by depthFirstSearch() led to a cycle with other element of edges.
This was due to the fact that if vertices v and u belonged to edges,
then the edge(vu) was disregarded by depthFirstSearch(). A problem
arises when depthFirstSearch() is modified so that it can detect
whether a specific edge(vu) is part of a cycle (see Exercise 20).
Should such a modified depth-first search be applied to each edge
separately, then the total run would be O(E(E+V)), which could turn
into O(V^4) for dense graphs. Hence, a better method needs to be
found.
The task is to determine if two vertices are in the same set. Two
operations are needed to implement this task: finding the set to which
a vertex v belongs and uniting two sets into one if vertex v belongs
to one of them and w to another. This is known as the union-find
problem.
Later on, author describes how to merge two sets into one in case an edge passed to the function union(edge e) connects vertices in distinct sets.
However, still I don't know how to quickly check whether an edge is part of a cycle. Could someone give me a rough explanation of such algorithm which is related to the aforementioned union-find problem?
a rough explanation could be checking if a link is a backlink, whenever you have a backlink you have a loop, and whenever you have a loop you have a backlink (that is true for directed and undirected graphs).
A backlink is an edge that points from a descendant to a parent, you should know that when traversing a graph with a DFS algorithm you build a forest, and a parent is a node that is marked finished later in the traversal.
I gave you some pointers to where to look, let me know if that helps you clarify your problems.

Reachable vertices from each other

Given a directed graph, I need to find all vertices v, such that, if u is reachable from v, then v is also reachable from u. I know that, the vertex can be find using BFS or DFS, but it seems to be inefficient. I was wondering whether there is a better solution for this problem. Any help would be appreciated.
Fundamentally, you're not going to do any better than some kind of search (as you alluded to). I wouldn't worry too much about efficiency: these algorithms are generally linear in the number of nodes + edges.
The problem is a bit underspecified, so I'll make some assumptions about your data structure:
You know vertex u (because you didn't ask to find it)
You can iterate both the inbound and outbound edges of a node (efficiently)
You can iterate all nodes in the graph
You can (efficiently) associate a couple bits of data along with each node
In this case, use a convenient search starting from vertex u (depth/breadth, doesn't matter) twice: once following the outbound edges (marking nodes as "reachable from u") and once following the inbound edges (marking nodes as "reaching u"). Finally, iterate through all nodes and compare the two bits according to your purpose.
Note: as worded, your result set includes all nodes that do not reach vertex u. If you intended the conjunction instead of the implication, then you can save a little time by incorporating the test in the second search, rather than scanning all nodes in the graph. This also relieves assumption 3.

Traversal of directed acyclic weighted graph with constraints

I have a directed acyclic weighted graph which I want to traverse.
The constraints for a valid solution route are:
The sum of the weights of all edges traversed in the route must be the highest possible in the graph, taking in mind the second constraint.
Exactly N vertices must have been visited in the chosen route (including the start and end vertex).
Typically the graph will have a high amount of vertices and edges, so trying all possibilities is not an option, and requires quite an efficient algorithm.
Looking for some pointers or a suitable algorithm for this problem. I know the first condition is easily fulfilled using Dijkstra's algorithm, but I am not sure how to incorporate the second condition, or even where to begin to look.
Please let me know if any additional information is needed.
I'm not sure if you are interested in any path of length N in the graph or just path between two specific vertices; I suspect the latter, but you did not mention that constraint in your question.
If the former, the solution should be a trivial Dijkstra-like algorithm where you sort all edges by their potential path value that starts at the edge weight and gets adjusted by already built adjecent paths. In each iteration, take the node with the best potential path value and add it to an adjecent path. Stop when you get a path of length N (or longer that you cut off at the sides). There are some other technical details esp. wrt. creating long paths, but I won't go into details as I suspect this is not what you are interested in. :-)
If you have fixed source and sink, I think there is no deep magic involved - just run a basic Dijkstra where a path will be associated with each vertex added to the queue, but do not insert vertices with path length >= N into the queue and do not insert sink into the queue unless its path length is N.

Directed Acyclical Graph Traversal... help?

a little out of my depth here and need to phone a friend. I've got a directed acyclical graph I need to traverse and I'm stumbling into to graph theory for the first time. I've been reading a lot about it lately but unfortunately I don't have time to figure this out academically. Can someone give me a kick with some help as to how to process this tree?
Here are the rules:
there are n root nodes (I call them "sources")
there are n end nodes
source nodes carry a numeric value
downstream nodes (I call them "worker" nodes) preform various operations on the incoming values like Add, Mult, etc.
As you can see from the graph below, nodes a, b, and c need to be processed before d, e, or f.
What's the proper order to walk this tree?
I would look into linearization of DAGs which should be achievable through Topological sorts.
Linearization, from what I remember, basically sorts in an order which holds to the invariant that for all nodes (Node_X) that have an outdegree to any other given node NodeA, NodeX appears before NodeA.
This would mean that, from your example, nodes a,b, and d would be processed first. Node c second. Nodes e and f, last.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_sorting
You need to process the nodes via a Topological sort. The sort is not necessarily unique so there might be more than one available order (not that this should matter anyway).
The linked wikipedia page should have concrete algorithms to help you.

general idea and maybe example on graph

I'm looking for a general idea (and maybe some code example or at least pseudocode)
Now, this is from a problem that someone gave me, or rather showed me, I don't have to solve it, but I did most of the questions anyway, the problem that I'm having is this:
Let's say you have a directed weighted graph with the following nodes:
AB5, BC4, CD8, DC8, DE6, AD5, CE2, EB3, AE7
and the question is:
how many different routes from C to C with a distance of less than x. (say, 10, 20, 30, 40)
The answer of different trips is: CDC, CEBC, CEBCDC, CDCEBC, CDEBC, CEBCEBC, CEBCEBCEBC.
The main problem I'm having with it is that when I do DFS or BFS, my implementation first chooses the node and marks it as visited therefore I'm only able to find 2 paths which are CDC and CEBC and then my algorithm quits. If I don't mark it as visited then on the next iteration (or recursive call) it will choose the same node and not next available route, so I have to always mark them as visited however by doing that how can I get for example CEBCEBCEBC, which is pretty much bouncing between nodes.
I've looked at all the different algorithms books that I have at home and while every algorithm describes how to do DFS, BFS and find shortest paths (all the good stufF), none show how to iterate indefinitively and stop only when one reaches certain weight of the graph or hits certain vertex number of times.
So why not just keep branching and branching; at each node you will evaluate two things; has this particular path exceeded the weight limit (if so, terminate the branch) and is this node where I started (in which case log my path history to an 'acceptable solutions' list); then make new branches which each take a step in each possible direction.
You should not mark nodes as visited; as MikeB points out, CDCDC is a valid solution and yet it revisits D.
I'd do it lke this:
Start with two lists of paths:
Solutions (empty) and
ActivePaths (containing one path, "C").
While ActivePaths is not empty,
Take a path out of ActivePaths (suppose it's "CD"[8]).
If its distance is not over the limit,
see where you are by looking at the last node in the path ("D").
If you're at "C", add a copy of this path to Solutions.
Now for each possible next destination ("C", "E")
make a copy of this path, ("CD"[8])
append the destination, ("CDC"[8])
add the weight, ("CDC"[16])
and put it in ActivePaths
Discard the path.
Whether this turns out to be a DFS, a BFS or something else depends on where in ActivePaths you insert and remove paths.
No offense, but this is pretty simple and you're talking about consulting a lot of books for the answer. I'd suggest playing around with the simple examples until they become more obvious.
In fact you have two different problems:
Find all distinct cycles from C to C, we will call them C_1, C_2, ..., C_n (done with a DFS)
Each C_i has a weight w_i, then you want every combination of cycles with a total weight less than N. This is a combinatorial problem (and seems to be easily solvable with dynamic programming).

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