Cycle bases in graphs characterization, algorithms, complexity, and applications

Cycles in graphs play an important role in many applications, e.g., analysis of electrical networks, analysis of chemical and biological pathways, periodic scheduling, and graph drawing. From a mathematical point of view, cycles in graphs have a rich structure. Cycle bases are a compact description of the set of all cycles of a graph. In this paper, we survey the state of knowledge on cycle bases and also derive some new results. We introduce different kinds of cycle bases, characterize them in terms of their cycle matrix, and prove structural results and a priori length bounds. We provide polynomial algorithms for the minimum cycle basis problem for some of the classes and prove APXAPX-hardness for others. We also discuss three applications and show that they require different kinds of cycle bases.