pythongraph-theoryundirected-graphhomomorphism

Graph Homomorphism using Python


My idea is to write a python program which would take as arguments two finite simple undirected graphs say G,H and returns the number hom(G,H) of graph homomorphisms from G to H.

Examples: If G=K_1 (one-vertex graph) then hom(G,H) equals the number of vertices of H. If G=K_2 (or equivalently, P_2), then hom(G,H) = 2 times the number of edges of H.

Can anyone please help me out? Thanks.


Solution

  • In general it's NP-hard. If the graph G has n vertices and the graph H has m vertices, a naive approach could be to check all n^m possible assignment functions between the two graphes.

    This is equivalent to do m chained loops over range(n).

    I know two ways to do it in python:

    1)You can generate m lists [1...n] and use itertools.product to get the cartesian product between these lists.

    2)You can generate a string with these chained loops code and execute it in python with the exec built-in function.

    If you use the first solution, it's highly parallelizable. So you can speed up quite a bit.

    An implementation of the first idea without parallelization would be something like this:

    from itertools import product
    
    def verify(G, H, f):
       homomorphism = True
    
       for edge in G:
           if not ((f[edge[0]], f[edge[1]]) in H):
               homomorphism = False
               break
    
       return homomorphism
    
    def solve(G, H, n, m):
       rangeG = [i for i in range(n)]
       assignments = list(product(rangeG, repeat=m))
       cnt = 0
    
       for f in assignments:
           if verify(G, H, f):
               cnt += 1
    
       return cnt
    

    Here the graphs G and H are stored as a set of tuples. The tuples represent the edges. This representation is very convenient to test the homomorphism condition and to apply assignment functions in a fast way. The parameters n and m are the number of vertices in each graph.

    For example, if you want G = S4 and H = P4 it would be something like this: G = {(0, 1), (1, 0), (0, 2), (2, 0), (0, 3), (3, 0)} and H = {(0, 1), (1, 0), (1, 2), (2, 1), (2, 3), (3, 2)}. Then you call the function solve(G, H, 4, 4).

    I tested it with some examples of the section 2.3 of this paper and it seems to be working well.

    As I said, the speed can be improved a lot with parallelization. This code is parallelizable almost everywhere. It needs some testing to see what is worth to execute in parallel.