Telling Stories Fast

This paper presents a linear-time delay algorithm for enumerating all directed acyclic subgraphs of a directed graph G(V,E) that have their sources and targets included in two subsets S and T of V, respectively. From these subgraphs, called pitches, the maximal ones, called stories, may be extracted in a dramatically more efficient way in relation to a previous story telling algorithm. The improvement may even increase if a pruning technique is further applied that avoids generating many pitches which have no chance to lead to a story. We experimentally demonstrate these statements by making use of a quite large dataset of real metabolic pathways and networks.