Adjacency List in Java

An adjacency list represents a graph as an array of linked list.

The index of the array represents a vertex and each element in its linked list represents the other vertices that form an edge with the vertex.

Adjacency List representation
A graph and its equivalent adjacency list representation is shown below.

An adjacency list is efficient in terms of storage because we only need to store the values for the edges. For a sparse graph with millions of vertices and edges, this can mean a lot of saved space.

Adjacency List Structure
The simplest adjacency list needs a node data structure to store a vertex and a graph data structure to organize the nodes.


We stay close to the basic definition of graph - a collection of vertices and edges {V, E}. For simplicity we use an unlabeled graph as opposed to a labeled one i.e. the vertexes are identified by their indices 0,1,2,3.

Let's dig into the data structures.

struct node
{
    int vertex;
    struct node* next;
};
struct Graph
{
    int numVertices;
    struct node** adjLists;
};

Don't let the struct node** adjLists overwhelm you.

All we are saying is we want to store a pointer to struct node*. This is because we don't know how many vertices the graph will have and so we cannot create an array of Linked Lists at compile time.

Adjacency List Java
We use Java Collections to store the Array of Linked Lists.

class Graph
{
    private int numVertices;
    private LinkedList adjLists[];
}

The type of LinkedList is determined what data you want to store in it. For a labeled graph, you could store a dictionary instead of an Integer

Adjacency List code Java

import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;
class Graph
{
    private int numVertices;
    private LinkedList adjLists[];
 
    Graph(int vertices)
    {
        numVertices = vertices;
        adjLists = new LinkedList[vertices];
        
        for (int i = 0; i < vertices; i++)
            adjLists[i] = new LinkedList();
    }
 
    void addEdge(int src, int dest)
    {
        adjLists[src].add(dest);
    }
 
    public static void main(String args[])
    {
        Graph g = new Graph(4);
 
         g.addEdge(0, 1);
         g.addEdge(0, 2);
         g.addEdge(1, 2);
         g.addEdge(2, 3);
    }
}