Question

In: Statistics and Probability

Minimum spanning trees were initially design to solve electrical grid problems but now have many more...

Minimum spanning trees were initially design to solve electrical grid problems but now have many more applications such as computer networks, transportation networks, and supply networks. Describe a business problem where minimum spanning trees can be used to find a solution.

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ANSWER:

A spanning tree of a graph is just a subgraph that contains all the vertices and is a tree. A graph may have many spanning trees; for instance the complete graph on four vertices

has sixteen spanning trees

The standard application is to a problem like phone network design. You have a business with several offices; you want to lease phone lines to connect them up with each other; and the phone company charges different amounts of money to connect different pairs of cities. You want a set of lines that connects all your offices with a minimum total cost. It should be a spanning tree, since if a network isn't a tree you can always remove some edges and save money.

A less obvious application is that the minimum spanning tree can be used to approximately solve the traveling salesman problem. A convenient formal way of defining this problem is to find the shortest path that visits each point at least once.

Note that if you have a path visiting all points exactly once, it's a special kind of tree. For instance in the example above, twelve of sixteen spanning trees are actually paths. If you have a path visiting some vertices more than once, you can always drop some edges to get a tree. So in general the MST weight is less than the TSP weight, because it's a minimization over a strictly larger set.

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