Graph Algorithm — Depth First Search

Rohith Vazhathody
3 min readMar 14, 2022

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DFS Algorithm

Depth First Search

Depth First Search(DFS) is a graph traversal algorithm that starts with a node in the graph and goes deeper and deeper until we reach a node that does not have further children. Then the algorithm backtracks towards the most recent node and continues the search if there are children unvisited.

Consider a graph given below, with node 0 as the start node. In the DFS algorithm, we will start our search from node 0 and mark it as visited. We continue our search deeper until we reach a dead-end and keep on backtracking to finding a node that has some unvisited children.

Getting ready to start the dfs

General Algorithm

📌 If the graph is disconnected, run a loop from node 0.

📌 A recursive function is called that takes the node and visited array.

📌 Mark the node as a visited node and store the node in the result list.

📌 Traverse the children of the current node and call the recursive function if the child is not visited.

DFS Walkthrough
Recursion Flow

Difference between Breadth First Search and Depth First Search

📌 BFS uses Queue data structure while DFS make use of Stack data structure.

📌 BFS can be used to find single source shortest path in an unweighted graph while in DFS we traverse through more edges to reach a particular destination.

📌 BFS considers all the neighbours first while DFS consider all the deep neighbours.

Time Complexity

📌 We are traversing through all the nodes and edges. So time complexity will be O(V + E) where V = vertices or node, E = edges.

📌 We use a visited array, adjacency list for the graph and some space for the recursion stack. So the space complexity will be O(V) + O(V + E) + Auxiliary space for recursion stack. (Ignoring the space for the final result list).

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Rohith Vazhathody
Rohith Vazhathody

Written by Rohith Vazhathody

Software Engineer | Weekly articles | Interested in DSA, design | Writes about problem solving, algorithm explanation of my understanding and Java Codes.

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