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In the mathematical discipline of graph theory, a matching or independent edge set in an undirected graph is a set of edges without common vertices. [1] In other words, a subset of the edges is a matching if each vertex appears in at most one edge of that matching. Finding a matching in a bipartite graph can be treated as a network flow problem.
Graph matching is the problem of finding a similarity between graphs. [ 1 ] Graphs are commonly used to encode structural information in many fields, including computer vision and pattern recognition , and graph matching is an important tool in these areas. [ 2 ]
The matching polynomial of a graph G with n vertices is related to that of its complement by a pair of (equivalent) formulas. One of them is a simple combinatorial identity due to Zaslavsky (1981) . The other is an integral identity due to Godsil (1981) .
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.
3-dimensional matchings. (a) Input T. (b)–(c) Solutions. In the mathematical discipline of graph theory, a 3-dimensional matching is a generalization of bipartite matching (also known as 2-dimensional matching) to 3-partite hypergraphs, which consist of hyperedges each of which contains 3 vertices (instead of edges containing 2 vertices in a usual graph).
The fifth corner (1/2,1/2,1/2) does not represent a matching - it represents a fractional matching in which each edge is "half in, half out". Note that this is the largest fractional matching in this graph - its weight is 3/2, in contrast to the three integral matchings whose size is only 1. As another example, in the 4-cycle there are 4 edges.
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 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.