Holger von Jouanne-Diedrich takes us through Dijkstra’s algorithm for shortest path calculations:
This post is partly based on this essay Python Patterns – Implementing Graphs, the example is from the German book “Das Geheimnis des kürzesten Weges” (“The secret of the shortest path”) by my colleague Professor Gritzmann and Dr. Brandenberg. For finding the most elegant way to convert data frames into igraph-objects I got help (once again!) from the wonderful R community over at StackOverflow.
Dijkstra’s algorithm is a recursive algorithm. If you are not familiar with recursion you might want to read my post To understand Recursion you have to understand Recursion… first.
Click through for an implementation in R.