January 2018
Beginner to intermediate
262 pages
6h 3m
English
A directed acyclic graph (DAG) is a special type of directed network. As the name suggests, it is an acyclic network—a network that does not contain any cycles (cycles are explainedhere). Visually, a DAG is a tree, a forest, a star, or a linear graph—for example, the linear graph and the tree in the figure here are DAGs.
Directed acyclic graphs describe hierarchies—systems in which their components are ranked one above the other according to some property. (A hierarchy is often informally referred to as a “pecking order”: who pecks whom?) In a hierarchy, any two components A and B are either unrelated, or A is unambiguously subordinated to B, or B is unambiguously subordinated to A, either ...
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