Pseudoforest

In graph theory, a pseudoforest is an undirected graph in which every connected component has at most one cycle. That is, it is a system of vertices and edges connecting pairs of vertices, such that no two cycles of consecutive edges share any vertex with each other, nor can any two cycles be connected to each other by a path of consecutive edges. A pseudotree is a connected pseudoforest.

The names are justified by analogy to the more commonly studied trees and forests. (A tree is a connected graph with no cycles; a forest is a disjoint union of trees.) Gabow and Tarjan attribute the study of pseudoforests to Dantzig's 1963 book on linear programming, in which pseudoforests arise in the solution of certain network flow problems. Pseudoforests also form graph-theoretic models of functions and occur in several algorithmic problems. Pseudoforests are sparse graphs – they have very few edges relative to their number of vertices – and their matroid structure allows several other families of sparse graphs to be decomposed as unions of forests and pseudoforests. The name "pseudoforest" comes from Picard & Queyranne (1982).

We define an undirected graph to be a set of vertices and edges such that each edge has two vertices (which may coincide) as endpoints. That is, we allow multiple edges (edges with the same pair of endpoints) and loops (edges whose two endpoints are the same vertex). A subgraph of a graph is the graph formed by any subsets of its vertices and edges such that each edge in the edge subset has both endpoints in the vertex subset. A connected component of an undirected graph is the subgraph consisting of the vertices and edges that can be reached by following edges from a single given starting vertex. A graph is connected if every vertex or edge is reachable from every other vertex or edge. A cycle in an undirected graph is a connected subgraph in which each vertex is incident to exactly two edges, or is a loop.

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