Effectively Counting s-t Simple Paths in Directed Graphs

An important tool in analyzing complex social and information networks is s-t simple path counting, which is known to be #P-complete. In this paper, we study efficient s-t simple path counting in directed graphs. For a given pair of vertices s and t in a directed graph, first we propose a pruning technique that can efficiently and considerably reduce the search space. Then, we discuss how this technique can be adjusted with exact and approximate algorithms, to improve their efficiency. In the end, by performing extensive experiments over several networks from different domains, we show high empirical efficiency of our proposed technique. Our algorithm is not a competitor of existing methods, rather, it is a friend that can be used as a fast pre-processing step, before applying any existing algorithm.