Digraph Polynomials for Counting Cycles and Paths

Abstract

Many polynomial invariants are defined on graphs for encoding the combinatorial information and researching them algebraically. In this paper, we introduce the cycle polynomial and the path polynomial of directed graphs for counting cycles and paths, respectively. They satisfy recurrence relations with respect to elementary edge or vertex operations. They are related to other polynomials and can also be generalized to the bivariate cycle polynomial, the bivariate path polynomial and the trivariate cycle-path polynomial. And a most general digraph polynomial satisfying such a linear recurrence relation is recursively defined and shown to be co-reducible to the trivariate cycle-path polynomial. We also give an explicit expression of this polynomial.