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Post Closed as "Not suitable for this site" by Andrés E. Caicedo, Ryan Budney, David White, Andrey Rekalo, Chris Godsil
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Given a directed acyclic graph G and a path made up from its set of nodes N, how can we determine if this (directed) path exists in G? If there is no exact match, what is the closest approximate match to N, equipped with an intuitive notion of distance?

A path in a directed acyclic graph is essentially a string (that uses the set of nodes as the alphabet), so when comparing paths one can make use of edit distances developed for approximate string matching:

There are many algorithms for approximate string matching:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximate_string_matching

This string matching answers the question when the G itself is also a path.. then we're merely asking to compare two strings.

Asking if an arbitrary graph A built from the same set of nodes is a sub-graph of G is the general case of the problem, but I'm only interested in the case where A is a path and G is directed & acyclic.

Any general pointers are also welcome.

--

Edit: I ended up using a dynamic programming algorithm, independently also suggested in the accepted answer. Good call! It is probably the most accurate option as well, and barely more "complex" than the string-to-string case when the average # of edges per node is low.

Given a directed acyclic graph G and a path made up from its set of nodes N, how can we determine if this (directed) path exists in G? If there is no exact match, what is the closest approximate match, equipped with an intuitive notion of distance?

A path in a directed acyclic graph is essentially a string (that uses the set of nodes as the alphabet), so when comparing paths one can make use of edit distances developed for approximate string matching:

There are many algorithms for approximate string matching:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximate_string_matching

This string matching answers the question when the G itself is also a path.. then we're merely asking to compare two strings.

Asking if an arbitrary graph A built from the same set of nodes is a sub-graph of G is the general case of the problem, but I'm only interested in the case where A is a path and G is directed & acyclic.

Any general pointers are also welcome.

Given a directed acyclic graph G and a path made up from its set of nodes N, what is the closest approximate match to N, equipped with an intuitive notion of distance?

A path in a directed acyclic graph is essentially a string (that uses the set of nodes as the alphabet), so when comparing paths one can make use of edit distances developed for approximate string matching:

There are many algorithms for approximate string matching:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximate_string_matching

This string matching answers the question when the G itself is also a path.. then we're merely asking to compare two strings.

Asking if an arbitrary graph A built from the same set of nodes is a sub-graph of G is the general case of the problem, but I'm only interested in the case where A is a path and G is directed & acyclic.

Any general pointers are also welcome.

--

Edit: I ended up using a dynamic programming algorithm, independently also suggested in the accepted answer. Good call! It is probably the most accurate option as well, and barely more "complex" than the string-to-string case when the average # of edges per node is low.

got rid of trivial q1, merged it with q2
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Deniz
Deniz
  • 387
  • 3
  • 9
  1. Given a directed acyclic graph G and a path made up from its set of nodes N, how can we determine if this (directed) path exists in G?
  2. If there is no exact match, what is the closest approximate match, equipped with an intuitive notion of distance?

Given a directed acyclic graph G and a path made up from its set of nodes N, how can we determine if this (directed) path exists in G? If there is no exact match, what is the closest approximate match, equipped with an intuitive notion of distance?

A path in a directed acyclic graph is essentially a string (that uses the set of nodes as the alphabet), so when comparing paths one can make use of edit distances developed for approximate string matching:

There are many algorithms for approximate string matching:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximate_string_matching

This string matching answers the question when the G itself is also a path.. then we're merely asking to compare two strings.

Asking if an arbitrary graph A built from the same set of nodes is a sub-graph of G is the general case of the problem, but I'm only interested in the case where A is a path and G is directed & acyclic.

Any general pointers are also welcome.

  1. Given a directed acyclic graph G and a path made up from its set of nodes N, how can we determine if this (directed) path exists in G?
  2. If there is no exact match, what is the closest approximate match, equipped with an intuitive notion of distance?

A path in a directed acyclic graph is essentially a string (that uses the set of nodes as the alphabet), so when comparing paths one can make use of edit distances developed for approximate string matching:

There are many algorithms for approximate string matching:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximate_string_matching

This string matching answers the question when the G itself is also a path.. then we're merely asking to compare two strings.

Asking if an arbitrary graph A built from the same set of nodes is a sub-graph of G is the general case of the problem, but I'm only interested in the case where A is a path and G is directed & acyclic.

Any general pointers are also welcome.

Given a directed acyclic graph G and a path made up from its set of nodes N, how can we determine if this (directed) path exists in G? If there is no exact match, what is the closest approximate match, equipped with an intuitive notion of distance?

A path in a directed acyclic graph is essentially a string (that uses the set of nodes as the alphabet), so when comparing paths one can make use of edit distances developed for approximate string matching:

There are many algorithms for approximate string matching:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximate_string_matching

This string matching answers the question when the G itself is also a path.. then we're merely asking to compare two strings.

Asking if an arbitrary graph A built from the same set of nodes is a sub-graph of G is the general case of the problem, but I'm only interested in the case where A is a path and G is directed & acyclic.

Any general pointers are also welcome.

Source Link
Deniz
Deniz
  • 387
  • 3
  • 9

Algorithm for determining if a path exists in a graph or if not, the closest edit distance.

  1. Given a directed acyclic graph G and a path made up from its set of nodes N, how can we determine if this (directed) path exists in G?
  2. If there is no exact match, what is the closest approximate match, equipped with an intuitive notion of distance?

A path in a directed acyclic graph is essentially a string (that uses the set of nodes as the alphabet), so when comparing paths one can make use of edit distances developed for approximate string matching:

There are many algorithms for approximate string matching:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximate_string_matching

This string matching answers the question when the G itself is also a path.. then we're merely asking to compare two strings.

Asking if an arbitrary graph A built from the same set of nodes is a sub-graph of G is the general case of the problem, but I'm only interested in the case where A is a path and G is directed & acyclic.

Any general pointers are also welcome.