Forest formulas of discrete Green's functions

Abstract

The discrete Green's functions are the pseudoinverse (or the inverse) of the Laplacian (or its variations) of a graph. In this paper, we will give combinatorial interpretations of Green's functions in terms of enumerating trees and forests in a graph that will be used to derive further formulas for several graph invariants. For example, we show that the trace of the Green's function $\mathbf{G}$ associated with the combinatorial Laplacian of a connected simple graph $\Gamma$ on $n$ vertices satisfies $\text{Tr}(\mathbf{G})=\sum_{\lambda_i \neq 0} \frac 1 {\lambda_i}= \frac{1}{n\tau}|\mathbb{F}^*_2|$, where $\lambda_i$ denotes the eigenvalues of the combinatorial Laplacian, $\tau$ denotes the number of spanning trees and $\mathbb{F}^*_2$ denotes the set of rooted spanning $2$-forests in $\Gamma$. We will prove forest formulas for discrete Green's functions for directed and weighted graphs and apply them to study random walks on graphs and digraphs. We derive a forest expression of the hitting time for digraphs, which gives combinatorial proofs to old and new results about hitting times, traces of discrete Green's functions, and other related quantities.