Estimating Residual Connectivity for Random Graphs

Abstract

Computation of the probability that a random graph is connected is a challenging problem, so it is natural to turn to approximations such as Monte Carlo methods. We describe sequential importance resampling and splitting algorithms for the estimation of these probabilities. The importance sampling steps of these algorithms involve identifying vertices that must be present in order for the random graph to be connected, and conditioning on the corresponding events. We provide numerical results demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.