Union of All Intersecting Sets

Question

Given a list of objects with multiple attributes I need to find the list of sets created by a union of all intersecting subsets.

Specifically these are Person object

Answer 1

I would guess that you have a relatively small set of attributes for the Person object (as compared to the number of Person objects you're considering). If you want to reduce traversing the list of Person objects multiple times, you can take a Person, put its attributes into a list of known possible connections and then move on to the next Person. With each successive Person, you see if it is connected to any prior connection. If so, then you add its unique attributes to the possible connections. You should be able to process all Person objects in one pass. It's possible that you'll have some disconnected sets in the results, so it may be worth examining the unconnected Person objects after you've created the first graph.