Algorithms 2015, 8, 810-831; doi:10.3390/a8040810 OPEN ACCESS algorithms ISSN 1999-4893 www.mdpi.com/journal/algorithms Article Finding Supported Paths in Heterogeneous Networks y Guillaume Fertin 1;*, Christian Komusiewicz 2, Hafedh Mohamed-Babou 1 and Irena Rusu 1 1 LINA, UMR CNRS 6241, Université de Nantes, Nantes 44322, France; E-Mails:
[email protected] (H.M.-B.);
[email protected] (I.R.) 2 Institut für Softwaretechnik und Theoretische Informatik, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin D-10587, Germany; E-Mail:
[email protected] y This paper is an extended version of our paper published in the Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Experimental Algorithms (SEA 2012), Bordeaux, France, 7–9 June 2012, originally entitled “Algorithms for Subnetwork Mining in Heterogeneous Networks”. * Author to whom correspondence should be addressed; E-Mail:
[email protected]; Tel.: +33-2-5112-5824. Academic Editor: Giuseppe Lancia Received: 17 June 2015 / Accepted: 29 September 2015 / Published: 9 October 2015 Abstract: Subnetwork mining is an essential issue in the analysis of biological, social and communication networks. Recent applications require the simultaneous mining of several networks on the same or a similar vertex set. That is, one searches for subnetworks fulfilling different properties in each input network. We study the case that the input consists of a directed graph D and an undirected graph G on the same vertex set, and the sought pattern is a path P in D whose vertex set induces a connected subgraph of G. In this context, three concrete problems arise, depending on whether the existence of P is questioned or whether the length of P is to be optimized: in that case, one can search for a longest path or (maybe less intuitively) a shortest one.