A computational study of Gomory-Hu tree algorithms

Vladimir Kolmogorov

Abstract: This paper studies algorithms for computing a Gomory-Hu tree, which is a classical data structure that compactly stores all minimum $s$-$t$ cuts of an undirected weighted graph. We consider two classes of algorithms: the original method by Gomory and Hu and the method based on "OrderedCuts" that we recently proposed. We describe practical implementations of these methods, and compare them experimentally with the algorithms from the previous experimental studies by Goldberg and Tsioutsiouliklis (2001) and by Akibo et al. (2016) (designed for unweighted simple graphs). Results indicate that the method based on OrderedCuts is the most robust, and often outperforms other implementations by a large factor.