Both methods aim to construct a minimally connected network that contains all of the seed nodes. This means that the only added nodes are ones that connect previously disjointed networks of seed nodes. The difference between the minimum network and the Steiner forest network is the way in which the approximate solution is computed.
- For the minimum network, mGWAS-Explorer implements an approximate approach based on shortest paths: we compute pair-wise shortest paths between all seed nodes, and remove the nodes that are not on the shortest paths.
- For the Steiner forest network, we implements a fast heuristic Prize-collecting Steiner Forest algorithm. The requirement for the minimum seed number is two.