Constant Time Enumeration of Subtrees with Exactly k Nodes in a Tree

Abstract

By the motivation to discover patterns in massive structured data in the form of graphs and trees, we study a special case of the k-subtree enumeration problem with a tree of n nodes as an input graph, which is originally introduced by (Ferreira, Grossi, and Rizzi, ESA'11, 275-286, 2011) for general graphs. Based on reverse search technique (Avis and Fukuda, Discrete Appl. Math., vol.65, pp.21-46, 1996), we present the first constant delay enumeration algorithm that lists all k-subtrees of an input rooted tree in O(1) worst-case time per subtree. This result improves on the straightforward application of Ferreira et al.'s algorithm with O(k) amortized time per subtree when an input is restricted to tree. Finally, we discuss an application of our algorithm to a modification of the graph motif problem for trees.