On the likelihood of forests

How complex a network is crucially impacts its function and performance. In many modern applications, the networks involved have a growth property and sparse structures, which pose challenges to physicists and applied mathematicians. In this paper, we introduce the forest likelihood as a plausible measure to gauge how difficult it is to construct a forest in a non-preferential attachment way. Based on the notions of admittable labeling and path construction, we propose algorithms for computing the forest likelihood of a given forest. Concrete examples as well as the distributions of forest likelihoods for all forests with some fixed numbers of nodes are presented. Moreover, we illustrate the ideas on real-life networks, including a benzenoid tree, a mathematical family tree, and a peer-to-peer network.