Transitive Reduction (Paperback)

High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! In mathematics, a transitive reduction of a binary relation R on a set X is a minimal relation R' on X such that the transitive closure of R' is the same as the transitive closure of R. If the transitive closure of R is antisymmetric and finite, then R' is unique. However, neither existence nor uniqueness of transitive reductions is guaranteed in general.In graph theory, any binary relation R on a set X may be thought of as a directed graph (V, A), where V = X is the vertex set and A = R is the set of arcs of the graph. The transitive reduction of a graph is sometimes referred to as its minimal representation.