Linking and Cutting Spanning Trees

We consider the problem of uniformly generating a spanning tree for an undirected connected graph. This process is useful for computing statistics, namely for phylogenetic trees. We describe a Markov chain for producing these trees. For cycle graphs, we prove that this approach significantly outperf...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Luís M. S. Russo, Andreia Sofia Teixeira, Alexandre P. Francisco
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2018-04-01
Series:Algorithms
Subjects:
Online Access:http://www.mdpi.com/1999-4893/11/4/53
Description
Summary:We consider the problem of uniformly generating a spanning tree for an undirected connected graph. This process is useful for computing statistics, namely for phylogenetic trees. We describe a Markov chain for producing these trees. For cycle graphs, we prove that this approach significantly outperforms existing algorithms. For general graphs, experimental results show that the chain converges quickly. This yields an efficient algorithm due to the use of proper fast data structures. To obtain the mixing time of the chain we describe a coupling, which we analyze for cycle graphs and simulate for other graphs.
ISSN:1999-4893