A Much Faster Algorithm for Finding a Maximum Clique

We present improvements to a branch-and-bound maximumclique-finding algorithm MCS (WALCOM 2010, LNCS 5942, pp. 191–203) that was shown to be fast. First, we employ an efficient approximation algorithm for finding a maximum clique. Second, we make use of appropriate sorting of vertices only near the root of the search tree. Third, we employ a lightened approximate coloring mainly near the leaves of the search tree. A new algorithm obtained from MCS with the above improvements is named MCT. It is shown that MCT is much faster than MCS by extensive computational experiments. In particular, MCT is shown to be faster than MCS for gen400 p0.9 75 and gen400 p0.9 65 by over 328,000 and 77,000 times, respectively

A Parallel Branch and Bound Algorithm for the Maximum Labelled Clique Problem

The maximum labelled clique problem is a variant of the maximum clique problem where edges in the graph are given labels, and we are not allowed to use more than a certain number of distinct labels in a solution. We introduce a new branch-and-bound algorithm for the problem, and explain how it may be parallelised. We evaluate an implementation on a set of benchmark instances, and show that it is consistently faster than previously published results, sometimes by four or five orders of magnitude.Comment: Author-final version. Accepted to Optimization Letter

Parallel Maximum Clique Algorithms with Applications to Network Analysis and Storage

We propose a fast, parallel maximum clique algorithm for large sparse graphs that is designed to exploit characteristics of social and information networks. The method exhibits a roughly linear runtime scaling over real-world networks ranging from 1000 to 100 million nodes. In a test on a social network with 1.8 billion edges, the algorithm finds the largest clique in about 20 minutes. Our method employs a branch and bound strategy with novel and aggressive pruning techniques. For instance, we use the core number of a vertex in combination with a good heuristic clique finder to efficiently remove the vast majority of the search space. In addition, we parallelize the exploration of the search tree. During the search, processes immediately communicate changes to upper and lower bounds on the size of maximum clique, which occasionally results in a super-linear speedup because vertices with large search spaces can be pruned by other processes. We apply the algorithm to two problems: to compute temporal strong components and to compress graphs.Comment: 11 page