Color-coding

This article is about a technique in the design of graph algorithms. For the use of color to display information, see color code. For other uses, see Color code (disambiguation).

In computer science and graph theory, the term color-coding refers to an algorithmic technique which is useful in the discovery of network motifs. For example, it can be used to detect a simple path of length k in a given graph. The traditional color-coding algorithm is probabilistic, but it can be derandomized without much overhead in the running time.

Color-coding also applies to the detection of cycles of a given length, and more generally it applies to the subgraph isomorphism problem (an NP-complete problem), where it yields polynomial time algorithms when the subgraph pattern that it is trying to detect has bounded treewidth.

The color-coding method was proposed and analyzed in 1994 by Noga Alon, Raphael Yuster, and Uri Zwick.[1][2]

  1. ^ Alon, N., Yuster, R., and Zwick, U. 1994. Color-coding: a new method for finding simple paths, cycles and other small subgraphs within large graphs. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Annual ACM Symposium on theory of Computing (Montreal, Quebec, Canada, May 23–25, 1994). STOC '94. ACM, New York, NY, 326–335. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/195058.195179
  2. ^ Alon, N., Yuster, R., and Zwick, U. 1995. Color-coding. J. ACM 42, 4 (Jul. 1995), 844–856. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/210332.210337