Suboptimal cycle bases for the force method

An improvement is presented for the existing minimal cycle basis selection algorithms increasing their efficiency. This consists of reducing the number of cycles to be considered as candidates for being the elements of a minimal cycle basis and makes practical use of the Greedy algorithm feasible. A modification is also included to form suboptimal‐minimal cycle bases in place of minimal bases. An efficient algorithm is developed to form suboptimal cycle bases of graphs, in which the Greedy algorithm is applied twice. First a suboptimal minimal cycle basis is formed, and then ignoring the minimality, a basis with elements having smaller overlaps is selected.