Levine and How developed an algorithm that can efficiently calculate just how much information any node in the graph gives you about any other — what in information theory is called “mutual information.” As Levine explains, one of the obstacles to performing that calculation efficiently is the presence of “loops” in the graph, or nodes that are connected by more than one path.

Calculating mutual information between nodes, Levine says, is kind of like injecting blue dye into one of them and then measuring the concentration of blue at the other. “It’s typically going to fall off as we go further out in the graph,” Levine says. “If there’s a unique path between them, then we can compute it pretty easily, because we know what path the blue dye will take. But if there are loops in the graph, then it’s harder for us to compute how blue other nodes are because there are many different paths.”

So the first step in the researchers’ technique is to calculate “spanning trees” for the graph. A tree is just a graph with no loops: In a family tree, for instance, a loop might mean that someone was both parent and sibling to the same person. A spanning tree is a tree that touches all of a graph’s nodes but dispenses with the edges that create loops.

Read more by Larry Hardesty at MIT News