The Central Spanning Tree Problem

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Sanmartín, Enrique Fita, Schnörr, Christoph, Hamprecht, Fred A.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Sanmartín, Enrique Fita
Schnörr, Christoph
Hamprecht, Fred A.
author_facet Sanmartín, Enrique Fita
Schnörr, Christoph
Hamprecht, Fred A.
contents Spanning trees are an important primitive in many data analysis tasks, when a data set needs to be summarized in terms of its "skeleton", or when a tree-shaped graph over all observations is required for downstream processing. Popular definitions of spanning trees include the minimum spanning tree and the optimum distance spanning tree, a.k.a. the minimum routing cost tree. When searching for the shortest spanning tree but admitting additional branching points, even shorter spanning trees can be realized: Steiner trees. Unfortunately, both minimum spanning and Steiner trees are not robust with respect to noise in the observations; that is, small perturbations of the original data set often lead to drastic changes in the associated spanning trees. In response, we make two contributions when the data lies in a Euclidean space: on the theoretical side, we introduce a new optimization problem, the "(branched) central spanning tree", which subsumes all previously mentioned definitions as special cases. On the practical side, we show empirically that the (branched) central spanning tree is more robust to noise in the data, and as such is better suited to summarize a data set in terms of its skeleton. We also propose a heuristic to address the NP-hard optimization problem, and illustrate its use on single cell RNA expression data from biology and 3D point clouds of plants.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_06447
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Central Spanning Tree Problem
Sanmartín, Enrique Fita
Schnörr, Christoph
Hamprecht, Fred A.
Discrete Mathematics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Data Structures and Algorithms
Combinatorics
Optimization and Control
Spanning trees are an important primitive in many data analysis tasks, when a data set needs to be summarized in terms of its "skeleton", or when a tree-shaped graph over all observations is required for downstream processing. Popular definitions of spanning trees include the minimum spanning tree and the optimum distance spanning tree, a.k.a. the minimum routing cost tree. When searching for the shortest spanning tree but admitting additional branching points, even shorter spanning trees can be realized: Steiner trees. Unfortunately, both minimum spanning and Steiner trees are not robust with respect to noise in the observations; that is, small perturbations of the original data set often lead to drastic changes in the associated spanning trees. In response, we make two contributions when the data lies in a Euclidean space: on the theoretical side, we introduce a new optimization problem, the "(branched) central spanning tree", which subsumes all previously mentioned definitions as special cases. On the practical side, we show empirically that the (branched) central spanning tree is more robust to noise in the data, and as such is better suited to summarize a data set in terms of its skeleton. We also propose a heuristic to address the NP-hard optimization problem, and illustrate its use on single cell RNA expression data from biology and 3D point clouds of plants.
title The Central Spanning Tree Problem
topic Discrete Mathematics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Data Structures and Algorithms
Combinatorics
Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.06447