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Concept
Adjacency matrix
Summary
In graph theory and computer science, an adjacency matrix is a square matrix used to represent a finite graph. The elements of the matrix indicate whether pairs of vertices are adjacent or not in the graph.
In the special case of a finite simple graph, the adjacency matrix is a (0,1)-matrix with zeros on its diagonal. If the graph is undirected (i.e. all of its edges are bidirectional), the adjacency matrix is symmetric.
The relationship between a graph and the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of its adjacency matrix is studied in spectral graph theory.
The adjacency matrix of a graph should be distinguished from its incidence matrix, a different matrix representation whose elements indicate whether vertex–edge pairs are incident or not, and its degree matrix, which contains information about the degree of each vertex.
For a simple graph with vertex set U = {u1, ..., un}, the adjacency matrix is a square n × n matrix A such that its element Aij is one when there is an edge from vertex ui to vertex uj, and zero when there is no edge. The diagonal elements of the matrix are all zero, since edges from a vertex to itself (loops) are not allowed in simple graphs. It is also sometimes useful in algebraic graph theory to replace the nonzero elements with algebraic variables. The same concept can be extended to multigraphs and graphs with loops by storing the number of edges between each two vertices in the corresponding matrix element, and by allowing nonzero diagonal elements. Loops may be counted either once (as a single edge) or twice (as two vertex-edge incidences), as long as a consistent convention is followed. Undirected graphs often use the latter convention of counting loops twice, whereas directed graphs typically use the former convention.
The adjacency matrix A of a bipartite graph whose two parts have r and s vertices can be written in the form
where B is an r × s matrix, and 0r,r and 0s,s represent the r × r and s × s zero matrices. In this case, the smaller matrix B uniquely represents the graph, and the remaining parts of A can be discarded as redundant.
Official source
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