On the empirical efficiency of the vertex contraction algorithm for detecting negative cost cyles in networks

  • Authors:
  • K. Subramani;D. Desovski

  • Affiliations:
  • LDCSEE, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV;LDCSEE, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV

  • Venue:
  • ICCS'05 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Computational Science - Volume Part I
  • Year:
  • 2005

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

In this paper, we present a comprehensive empirical analysis of the Vertex Contraction (VC) algorithm for the problem of checking whether a directed graph with positive and negative costs on its edges has a negative cost cycle (NCCD). VC is a greedy algorithm, first presented in [SK05], for NCCD and is the only known greedy strategy for this problem. In [SK05] we compared a naive implementation of VC with the “standard” Bellman-Ford (BF) algorithm for the same problem. We observed that our algorithm performed an order of magnitude better than the BF algorithm on a range of randomly generated inputs, thereby conclusively demonstrating the superiority of our approach. This paper continues the study of contrasting greedy and dynamic programming approaches, by comparing VC with a number of sophisticated implementations of the BF algorithm.