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Sar Champagne Bielert edited this page Apr 8, 2024 · 10 revisions

Introduction

Graphs are one of the most prevalent data structures in computer science. It's a powerful data structure that's utilized to represent relationships between different types of data. In a graph, each data point is stored as a node and each relationship between those data points is represented by an edge. For example, a social network is considered a graph in which each person is considered a node and a friendship between two people is considered an edge.

Graphs are best utilized for problems in which there are binary relationships between objects. Once a problem can be represented as a graph, the problem can generally be solved based off of one of the key graph algorithms. For interviews, it is vital to know how to implement a graph, basic graph traversals (BFS, DFS) and how to sort topologically the graph.

Graph Terminology

Graph components

Graphs consist of a set of..

  • vertices, which are also referred to as nodes
    • Nodes that are directly connected by an edge are commonly referred to as neighbors.
  • edges, connections between pairs of vertices

Graph types

Directed & undirected graphs

A directed graph is a graph that in which all edges are associated with a direction. An example of a directed edge would be a one way street.

An undirected graph is a graph in which all edges do not have a direction. An example of this would be a friendship!

Cyclic & acyclic graphs

Before going over the what cyclic and acyclic graphs are, there are two key terms to cover: path and cycle. A path is a sequence of vertices connected by edges and a cycle a path whose first and last vertices are the same.

A cyclic graph means that there contains a least one cycle within the graph.

An acyclic graph has no cycles within it.

A commonly used phrase when referring to graphs is a directed acylic graph (DAG), which is a directed graph in which there are no cycles. In a DAG, these two terms are commonly used to denote nodes with special properties:

  • Sink nodes have no outgoing edges, only incoming edges
  • Source nodes only have outgoing edges, no incoming edges

Graph representations

Adjacency lists

Adjacency list is the most common way to represent graphs. With this approach of representing a graph, each node stores a list of its adjacent vertices. For undirected graphs, each edge from u to v would be stored twice: once in u's list of neighbors and once in v's list of neighbors.

Edge sets/ lists

An edge set simply represents a graph as a collection of all its edges.

Adjacency matrix

An adjacency matrix represents a graph with n nodes as a n by n boolean matrix, in which matrix[u][v] is set to true if an edge exists from node u to node v.

The representation of a graph is efficient for checking if an edge exists between a pair of vertices. However, it may be less efficient for search algorithms because it requires iterating through all the nodes in the graph to identify a node's neighbors.

Runtime Analysis

Below is a chart of the most common graph operations and their runtimes for each of the graph representations. In the chart below, V represents the number of verticies in the graph and E represents the number of edges in the graph.

Representation Getting all adjacent edges for a vertex Traversing entire graph hasEdge(u, v) Space
Adjacency matrix O(V) O(V2) O(1) O(V2)
Edge Set O(E) O(E) O(E) O(E)
Adjacency List O(1) O(V + E) O(max number of edges a vertex has) O(E + V)

Credit: UC Berkeley data structures course

Glossary

  1. vertex (node): used to represent a single data point
  2. edge: a connection between a pair of vertices
  3. neighbor: a neighbor node is a node that is directly connected to another node by an edge
  4. directed graph: a graph in which all edges have direction
  5. undirected graph: a graph in which all edges have no direction
  6. path: a sequence of vertices connected by edges
  7. cycle: a paththat begins and ends at the same vertex
  8. cyclic graph: a graph which contains at least one cycle
  9. acyclic graph: a graph whichdoes not contain a cycle
  10. adjacency list: an approach to representing graphs in which each node stores a list of its adjacent vertices
  11. edge set/list: an approach to representing graphs in which a graph is a collection of all its edges
  12. adjacency matrix: an approach to representing graphs in which a graph with n nodes is storeed as an n by n boolean matrix, where matrix[u][v] is true if an edge exists between node u to node v.
  13. sink nodes: in a DAG, a sink node has no outgoing edges
  14. source nodes: in a DAG, a source node only has outgoing edges
  15. directed acylic graph (DAG): a directed graph in which there are no cycles

Extra graph algorithms

NOTE: This section covers algorithms that will generally not come up in interviews.

Union find, disjoint sets

Shortest paths algorithms

Minimum spanning tree algorithms

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