Graph Algorithms

This course is a part of Algorithms and Data Structures, a 9-course MicroMasters series from edX.

If you have ever used a navigation service to find the optimal route and estimate time to destination, you've used algorithms on graphs.

Graphs arise in various real-world situations, as there are road networks, water and electricity supply networks, computer networks and, most recently, social networks! If you're looking for the fastest time to get to work, cheapest way to connect set of computers into a network or efficient algorithm to automatically find communities and opinion leaders in Facebook, you're going to work with graphs and algorithms on graphs.

In this course, part of the Algorithms and Data Structures MicroMasters program, you will learn what a graph is and its most important properties. You’ll learn several ways to traverse graphs and how you can do useful things while traversing the graph in some order. We will also talk about shortest paths algorithms. We will finish with minimum spanning trees, which are used to plan road, telephone and computer networks and also find applications in clustering and approximate algorithms.

What you'll learn

• Graph exploration and decomposition into connected components
• Shortest paths algorithms, including breadth-first search, Dijkstra’s algorithm and Bellman-Ford algorithm
• Minimum spanning tree algorithms