Enumeration of Irredundant Forests

Abstract

Reverse search is a convenient method for enumerating structured objects, that can be used both to address theoretical issues and to solve data mining problems. This method has already been successfully developed to handle unordered trees. If the literature proposes solutions to enumerate singletons of trees, we study in this article a more general, higher combinatorial problem, the enumeration of sets of trees -forests. By compressing each forest into a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), we develop a reverse search like method to enumerate DAG compressing forests. Remarkably, we prove that these DAG are in bijection with the row-Fishburn matrices, a well-studied class of combinatorial objects. In a second step, we derive our forest enumeration to provide algorithms for tackling two related problems : (i) the enumeration of "subforests" of a forest, and (ii) the frequent "subforest" mining problem. All the methods presented in this article enumerate each item uniquely, up to isomorphism.