Algorithms for network modularity maximization

National audienceNetworks are often used to represent complex systems arising in a variety of fields. Social networks model interactions among people. Telecommunication networks model communications betwen them, such as in the WorldWide Web. Transportation networks model movements of goods and passengers. Biological networks model interactions between organisms, such as in food networks. A network (or graph) G = (V,E) is composed of a set of vertices, representing the entities of the system under study, and a set of edges joining pairs of vertices and representing a relation holding for such pairs. Identifying communities, or clusters, in complex networks is a topic of particular interest and is currently a very active research domain

Decomposition of Trees and Paths via Correlation

We study the problem of decomposing (clustering) a tree with respect to costs attributed to pairs of nodes, so as to minimize the sum of costs for those pairs of nodes that are in the same component (cluster). For the general case and for the special case of the tree being a star, we show that the problem is NP-hard. For the special case of the tree being a path, this problem is known to be polynomial time solvable. We characterize several classes of facets of the combinatorial polytope associated with a formulation of this clustering problem in terms of lifted multicuts. In particular, our results yield a complete totally dual integral (TDI) description of the lifted multicut polytope for paths, which establishes a connection to the combinatorial properties of alternative formulations such as set partitioning.Comment: v2 is a complete revisio

A cutting-plane approach to the edge-weighted maximal clique problem

We investigated the computational performance of a cutting-plane algorithm for the problem of determining a maximal subclique in an edge-weighted complete graph. Our numerical results are contrasted with reports on closely related problems for which cutting-plane approaches perform well in instances of moderate size. Somewhat surprisingly, we find that our approach already in the case of n = 15 or N = 25 nodes in the underlying graph typically neither produces an integral solution nor yields a good approximation to the true optimal objective function value. This result seems to shed some doubt on the universal applicability of cuttingplane approaches as an efficient means to solve linear (0, 1)-programming problems of moderate size

Community Detection: Statistical Inference Models

Community detection in large networks through the methods based on the statistical inference model can identify the node community as well as find the interaction between the communities. Statistical inference based methods try to fit a generative model to the network data. This paper discusses the statistical inference methods which groups the communities on vertices or nodes

Using mathematical programming to refine heuristic solutions for network clustering

International audienceWe propose mathematical programming based aproaches to refine graph clustering solutions computed by heuristics. Clustering partitions are refined by applying cluster splitting and a combination of merging and splitting actions. A refinement scheme based on iteratively fixing and releasing integer variables of a mixed-integer quadratic optimization formulation appears to be particularly efficient. Computational experiments show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approaches

Evaluation of ILP-based approaches for partitioning into colorful components

The NP-hard Colorful Components problem is a graph partitioning problem on vertex-colored graphs. We identify a new application of Colorful Components in the correction of Wikipedia interlanguage links, and describe and compare three exact and two heuristic approaches. In particular, we devise two ILP formulations, one based on Hitting Set and one based on Clique Partition. Furthermore, we use the recently proposed implicit hitting set framework [Karp, JCSS 2011; Chandrasekaran et al., SODA 2011] to solve Colorful Components. Finally, we study a move-based and a merge-based heuristic for Colorful Components. We can optimally solve Colorful Components for Wikipedia link correction data; while the Clique Partition-based ILP outperforms the other two exact approaches, the implicit hitting set is a simple and competitive alternative. The merge-based heuristic is very accurate and outperforms the move-based one. The above results for Wikipedia data are confirmed by experiments with synthetic instances

Orbitopal Fixing

The topic of this paper are integer programming models in which a subset of 0/1-variables encode a partitioning of a set of objects into disjoint subsets. Such models can be surprisingly hard to solve by branch-and-cut algorithms if the order of the subsets of the partition is irrelevant, since this kind of symmetry unnecessarily blows up the search tree. We present a general tool, called orbitopal fixing, for enhancing the capabilities of branch-and-cut algorithms in solving such symmetric integer programming models. We devise a linear time algorithm that, applied at each node of the search tree, removes redundant parts of the tree produced by the above mentioned symmetry. The method relies on certain polyhedra, called orbitopes, which have been introduced bei Kaibel and Pfetsch (Math. Programm. A, 114 (2008), 1-36). It does, however, not explicitly add inequalities to the model. Instead, it uses certain fixing rules for variables. We demonstrate the computational power of orbitopal fixing at the example of a graph partitioning problem.Comment: 22 pages, revised and extended version of a previous version that has appeared under the same title in Proc. IPCO 200