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A maximal matching is a matching M of a graph G that is not a subset of any other matching. A matching M of a graph G is maximal if every edge in G has a non-empty intersection with at least one edge in M. The following figure shows examples of maximal matchings (red) in three graphs. A maximum matching (also known as maximum-cardinality ...
Maximum cardinality matching is a fundamental problem in graph theory. [1] We are given a graph G, and the goal is to find a matching containing as many edges as possible; that is, a maximum cardinality subset of the edges such that each vertex is adjacent to at most one edge of the subset. As each edge will cover exactly two vertices, this ...
In this case, the dual graph is cubic and bridgeless, so by Petersen's theorem it has a matching, which corresponds in the original graph to a pairing of adjacent triangle faces. Each pair of triangles gives a path of length three that includes the edge connecting the triangles together with two of the four remaining triangle edges.
A perfect matching can only occur when the graph has an even number of vertices. A near-perfect matching is one in which exactly one vertex is unmatched. This can only occur when the graph has an odd number of vertices, and such a matching must be maximum. In the above figure, part (c) shows a near-perfect matching.
The case of exact graph matching is known as the graph isomorphism problem. [1] The problem of exact matching of a graph to a part of another graph is called subgraph isomorphism problem. Inexact graph matching refers to matching problems when exact matching is impossible, e.g., when the number of vertices in the two graphs are different. In ...
The matching is constructed by iteratively improving an initial empty matching along augmenting paths in the graph. Unlike bipartite matching, the key new idea is that an odd-length cycle in the graph (blossom) is contracted to a single vertex, with the search continuing iteratively in the contracted graph.
There is also a constant s which is at most the cardinality of a maximum matching in the graph. The goal is to find a minimum-cost matching of size exactly s. The most common case is the case in which the graph admits a one-sided-perfect matching (i.e., a matching of size r), and s=r. Unbalanced assignment can be reduced to a balanced assignment.
The Hosoya index of a graph G, its number of matchings, is used in chemoinformatics as a structural descriptor of a molecular graph. It may be evaluated as m G (1) (Gutman 1991). The third type of matching polynomial was introduced by Farrell (1980) as a version of the "acyclic polynomial" used in chemistry.