I'm new to the search strategies. Does anyone know how to analyze the time complexity of the figure below?
The best way to analyse time complexity for such problems is to check how many times a vertex and edge is accessed. Since in both BFS and DFS a single node is only visited once we can say it would be O(V + E) where v is the number of vertices and E is the number of edges.
Related
There is a theory that says six degrees of seperations is the highest
degree for people to be connected through a chain of acquaintances.
(You know the Baker - Degree of seperation 1, the Baker knows someone
you don't know - Degree of separation 2)
We have a list of People P, list A of corresponding acquaintances
among these people, and a person x
We are trying to implement an algorithm to check if person x respects
the six degrees of separations. It returns true if the distance from x
to all other people in P is at most six, false otherwise.
We are tying to accomplish O(|P| + |A|) in the worst-case.
To implement this algorithm, I thought about implementing an adjacency list over an adjacency matrix to represent the Graph G with vertices P and edges A, because an Adjacency Matrix would take O(n^2) to traverse.
Now I thought about using either BFS or DFS, but I can't seem to find a reason as to why the other is more optimal for this case.
I want to use BFS or DFS to store the distances from x in an array d, and then loop over the array d to look if any Degree is larger than 6.
DFS and BFS have the same Time Complexity, but Depth is better(faster?) in most cases at finding the first Degree larger than 6, whereas Breadth is better at excluding all Degrees > 6 simultaneously.
After DFS or BFS I would then loop over the array containing the distances from person x, and return true if there was no entry >6 and false when one is found.
With BFS, the degrees of separations would always be at the end of the Array, which would maybe lead to a higher time complexity?
With DFS, the degrees of separations would be randomly scattered in the Array, but the chance to have a degree of separation higher than 6 early in the search is higher.
I don't know if it makes any difference to the Time Complexity if using DFS or BFS here.
Time complexity of BFS and DFS is exactly the same. Both methods visit all connected vertices of the graph, so in both cases you have O(V + E), where V is the number of vertices and E is the number of edges.
That being said, sometimes one algorithm can be preferred over the other precisely because the order of vertex visitation is different. For instance, if you were to evaluate a mathematical expression, DFS would be much more convenient.
In your case, BFS could be used to optimize graph traversal, because you can simply cut-off BFS at the required degree of separation level. All the people who have the required (or bigger) degree of separation would be left unmarked as visited.
The same trick would be much more convoluted to implement with DFS, because as you've astutely noticed, DFS first gets "to the bottom" of the graph, and then it goes back recursively (or via stack) up level by level.
I believe that you can use the the Dijkstra algorithm.
Is a BFS approach that updates your path, is the path have a smaller value. Think as distance have always a cost of 1 and, if you have two friends (A and B) for a person N.
Those friends have a common friend C but, in a first time your algorithm checks a distance for friend A with cost 4 and mark as visited, they can't check the friend B that maybe have a distance of 3. The Dijkstra will help you doing checking this.
The Dijkstra solve this in O(|V|+|E|log|V)
See more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dijkstra%27s_algorithm
I am very new to graph theory and I am trying to understand the following. Given an undirected graph G with V vertexes and E edges, what is the time complexity of counting all the complete subgraphs of size k and what is the time complexity of counting all the cycles of length k? Basically, which one is faster? I am only considering cases where k is even. Are there any well-known references for this?
Counting all cycles of length k can, in general, be achieved in O(VE) time (V = number of vertices, E = number of edges), although this number can be greatly improved depending on k (Ref). Counting all complete subgraphs or cliques can be achieved in O(nk k2) in the general case, but again, this number can be improved upon depending on the structure of the graph and algorithm used (Ref).
I am confused with BFS complexity. Wikipédia say : "The time complexity can be expressed as O(|V|+|E|) since every vertex and every edge will be explored in the worst case".
set start vertex to visited
load it into queue
while queue not empty
for each edge incident to vertex
if its not visited
load into queue
mark vertex
For me the worst case is : each vertex are connected to all the vertices
So the while loop will be done V times and the for loop E times. A worst case scenario of 0(VE).
What did I do wrong?
The purpose of BFS is to visit all the nodes once. No vertex ever gets into the queue for a second time (which explains the |V|). The |E| of the summation comes from the assumption that checking incident edges costs nothing compared to a visit. So yes, for a complete graph (all vertices are connected to all other vertices) VE edges will be checked...but checking them does not cost a visit.
Time complexity of BFS is O(|V|+|E|). V is the number of total vertex and E is the number of total edge. You may mistake for the E. E is not the neighbor edges of vertex u.
We can implement this as below.
for each u in vertices
for each e in neighbor(u)
do something.
I was asked an interview question today and I was not able to solve at that time.
The question is to get the minimum time complexity of finding the shortest path from node S to node T in a graph G where:
G is undirected and unweighted
The connection factor of G is given as B
The length of shortest path from S to T is given as K
The first thing I thought was that in general case, the BFS is fastest way to get the SP from S to T, in O(V+E) time. Then how can we use the B and K to reduce the time. I'm not sure what a connection factor is, so I asked the interviewer, then he told me that it is on average a node has B edges with other nodes. So I was thinking that if K = 1, then the time complexity should be O(B). But wait, it is "on average", which means it could still be O(E+V), where the graph is a like a star and all other nodes are connected to S.
If we assume that the B is a strict up limit. Then the first round of BFS is O(B), and the second is O(B*B), and so on, like a tree. Some of the nodes in the lower layer may be already visited in the previous round therefore should not be added. Still, the worst scenario is that the graph is huge and none of the node has been visited. And the time complexity is
O(B) + O(B^2) + O(B^3) ... O(B^K)
Using the sum of Geometric Series, the sum is O(B(1-B^K)/(1-B)). But this SUM should not exceed V+E.
So, is the time complexity is O(Min(SUM, V+E))?
I have no idea how to correctly solve this problem. Any help is appreciated.
Your analysis seems correct. Please refer to the following references.
http://axon.cs.byu.edu/~martinez/classes/312/Slides/Paths.pdf
https://courses.engr.illinois.edu/cs473/sp2011/lectures/03_class.pdf
I stumbled over this question in my textbook:
"In general, on what does the time complexity of Prim's, Kruskal's and Dijkstra's algorithms depends on?"
a. The number of vertices in the graph.
b. The number of edges in the graph.
c. Both, on the number of vertices and edges in the graph.
Explain your choice.
So according to Wikipedia Prim's,Kruskal's and Dijkstra's algorithms worst case time complexities are O(ElogV), O(ElogV) and O(E+VlogV) respectively. So i guess the answer is c? But why?
I don't know about Prim's and Kruskal's and might be wrong about Dijkstra's but I think in its case the answer would be b because:
Dijkstra's will visit nodes on the shortest known path until it finds the destination.
This implies that if two edges point to the same node, only one will ever be considered by the algorithm since one has a higher weight or they're equal, rendering one edge moot to follow.
Therefore, the only way to increase the time spent traversing the graph by adding edges is by adding nodes (adding edges on existing node can change the algorithm's traversal time but it's not proportional to the amount of edges, only to their weights).
Therefore, my intuition is that only the amount of nodes are in direct relation with running time. The Dijkstra's Alogrithm wikipedia page seems to confirm this:
The simplest implementation of the Dijkstra's algorithm stores
vertices of set Q in an ordinary linked list or array, and extract
minimum from Q is simply a linear search through all vertices in Q. In
this case, the running time is O(E + V^2) or O(V^2).
This is only an intuition of course, and cs.stackex might be of greater use.
The answer is (c), because both V and E contribute to the asymptotic complexity of the respective algorithms. Now, on further analysis one could argue that V is much less on Kruskal's and Prim's(since it is log factor). But E seems to almost have same weights in all three cases.
Also, note that |E| <= |V|^2 always (for simple graphs)
In worst case graph will be a complete graph i.e v(v-1)/2 edges ie e>>v and e ~ v^2
Time Complexity of Prim's and Dijkstra's algorithms are:
1. With Adjacency List and Priority queue:
O((v+e) log v) in worst case: e>>v so O( e log v)
2. With matrix and Priority queue:
O(v^2 + e log v) in WC e ~ v^2
So O(v^2 + e log v) ~ O(e + e log v) ~ O(e log v).
3. When graph go denser ( Worst case is Complete Graph ) we use Fibonacci Heap
and adjacency list: O( e + v log v)
Time complexity of kruskal is O(e log e) in Worst case e ~ v^2
so log (v^2) = 2 log v
So we can safely say than O(e log e) can be O( 2e log v)
ie O( e log v) in worst case.
As you said, the time complexities of O(ElogV), O(ElogV), and O(E+VlogV) mean that each one is dependent on both E and V. This is because each algorithm involves considering the edges and their respective weights in a graph. Since for Prim’s and Kruskal’s the MST has to be connected and include all vertices, and for Dijkstra’s the shortest path has to pass from one vertex to another through other intermediary vertices, the vertices also have to be considered in each algorithm.
For example, with Dijkstra’s algorithm, you are essentially looking to add edges that are both low in cost and that connect vertices that will eventually provide a path from the starting vertex to the ending vertex. To find the shortest path, you cannot solely look for a path that connects the start vertex to the end, and you cannot solely look for the smallest weighted edges, you need to consider both. Since you are considering both edges and vertices, the time it takes to make these considerations throughout the algorithm will depend on the number of edges and number of vertices.
Additionally, different time complexities are possible through different implementations of the three algorithms, and analyzing each algorithm requires a consideration of both E and V.
For example, Prim’s algorithm is O(V^2), but can be improved with the use of a min heap-based priority queue to achieve the complexity you found: O(ElogV). O(ElogV) may seem like the faster algorithm, but that’s not always the case. E can be as large as V^2, so in dense graphs with close to V^2 edges, O(ElogV) becomes O(V^2). If V is very small then there is not much difference between O(V^2) and O(ElogV). E and V also influence the running time based on the way that the graph is being stored. For example, an adjacency list becomes very inefficient with dense graphs (with E approaching V^2) because checking to see if an edge exists in the graph goes from close to O(1) to O(V).