New Algorithms for Incremental Minimum Spanning Trees and Temporal Graph Applications

Abstract: Processing graphs with temporal information (the temporal graphs) has become increasingly important in the real world. In this paper, we study efficient solutions to temporal graph applications using new algorithms for Incremental Minimum Spanning Trees (MST). The first contribution of this work is to formally discuss how a broad set of setting-problem combinations of temporal graph processing can be solved using incremental MST, along with their theoretical guarantees. Despite the importance of the problem, we observe a gap between theory and practice for efficient incremental MST algorithms. While many classic data structures, such as the link-cut tree, provide strong bounds for incremental MST, their performance is limited in practice. Meanwhile, existing practical solutions used in applications do not have any non-trivial theoretical guarantees. Our second and main contribution includes new algorithms for incremental MST that are efficient both in theory and in practice. Our new data structure, the AM-tree, achieves the same theoretical bound as the link-cut tree for temporal graph processing and shows strong performance in practice. In our experiments, the AM-tree has competitive or better performance than existing practical solutions due to theoretical guarantees, and can be significantly faster than the link-cut tree (7.8-11x in updates and 7.7-13.7x in queries).