Iminelinked

Iminelinked is a term used in graph theory and data analysis to describe a way of building a chain of nodes in a weighted graph. In an iminelinked chain, each successive node is chosen to be the closest available neighbor to the current node according to a predefined metric, with the requirement that nodes are not revisited or skipped in the sequence. The concept emphasizes local proximity and greedy progression, rather than global optimization.

Origin and formal idea: The term was coined in 2019 by researchers at the Institute for Minimalist Networks to capture a common greedy linking strategy. Formally, given a graph with nonnegative edge weights, a chain v0, v1, ..., vk is iminelinked if for each i from 0 to k-1, vi+1 is a nearest neighbor of vi among the nodes not yet included in the chain.

Applications: Iminelinked links appear in scalable clustering, route planning, and data integration where fast, local decisions are preferred over exhaustive optimization. It is used to generate compact representations of networks, initialize hierarchical structures, or seed community detection algorithms.

Relation to other ideas: It shares intuition with nearest-neighbor graphs and greedy path algorithms but differs from constructs like minimum spanning trees, which optimize globally. Iminelinked chains are sensitive to node ordering and starting points, and may produce different results under alternative metrics.

See also: nearest-neighbor graph, greedy algorithm, hierarchical clustering, pathfinding, and link analysis.