Branched Structures

In data science, branched structures such as trees and graphs facilitate the analysis of direct and indirect relationships between data elements. Due to the branching, access to an element from another element may be direct (if the elements are adjacent) or indirect (if the element is accessible only via intermediary elements). Trees and graphs lend to modeling real-world systems that are more complex than linear systems. In systems engineering, consider the resemblance to graphs of network topologies, or the tree-like hierarchies of operating system processes and file systems. The indexing of trees and graphs can be mapped to various linear structures to facilitate processing.