Simplified Energy Landscape for Modularity Using Total Variation

Networks capture pairwise interactions between entities and are frequently used in applications such as social networks, food networks, and protein interaction networks, to name a few. Communities, cohesive groups of nodes, often form in these applications, and identifying them gives insight into the overall organization of the network. One common quality function used to identify community structure is modularity. In Hu et al. [SIAM J. App. Math., 73(6), 2013], it was shown that modularity optimization is equivalent to minimizing a particular nonconvex total variation (TV) based functional over a discrete domain. They solve this problem, assuming the number of communities is known, using a Merriman, Bence, Osher (MBO) scheme. We show that modularity optimization is equivalent to minimizing a convex TV-based functional over a discrete domain, again, assuming the number of communities is known. Furthermore, we show that modularity has no convex relaxation satisfying certain natural conditions. We therefore, find a manageable non-convex approximation using a Ginzburg Landau functional, which provably converges to the correct energy in the limit of a certain parameter. We then derive an MBO algorithm with fewer hand-tuned parameters than in Hu et al. and which is 7 times faster at solving the associated diffusion equation due to the fact that the underlying discretization is unconditionally stable. Our numerical tests include a hyperspectral video whose associated graph has 2.9x10^7 edges, which is roughly 37 times larger than was handled in the paper of Hu et al.Comment: 25 pages, 3 figures, 3 tables, submitted to SIAM J. App. Mat

On Characterizing the Data Movement Complexity of Computational DAGs for Parallel Execution

Technology trends are making the cost of data movement increasingly dominant, both in terms of energy and time, over the cost of performing arithmetic operations in computer systems. The fundamental ratio of aggregate data movement bandwidth to the total computational power (also referred to the machine balance parameter) in parallel computer systems is decreasing. It is there- fore of considerable importance to characterize the inherent data movement requirements of parallel algorithms, so that the minimal architectural balance parameters required to support it on future systems can be well understood. In this paper, we develop an extension of the well-known red-blue pebble game to develop lower bounds on the data movement complexity for the parallel execution of computational directed acyclic graphs (CDAGs) on parallel systems. We model multi-node multi-core parallel systems, with the total physical memory distributed across the nodes (that are connected through some interconnection network) and in a multi-level shared cache hierarchy for processors within a node. We also develop new techniques for lower bound characterization of non-homogeneous CDAGs. We demonstrate the use of the methodology by analyzing the CDAGs of several numerical algorithms, to develop lower bounds on data movement for their parallel execution

Minimum Cuts in Near-Linear Time

We significantly improve known time bounds for solving the minimum cut problem on undirected graphs. We use a ``semi-duality'' between minimum cuts and maximum spanning tree packings combined with our previously developed random sampling techniques. We give a randomized algorithm that finds a minimum cut in an m-edge, n-vertex graph with high probability in O(m log^3 n) time. We also give a simpler randomized algorithm that finds all minimum cuts with high probability in O(n^2 log n) time. This variant has an optimal RNC parallelization. Both variants improve on the previous best time bound of O(n^2 log^3 n). Other applications of the tree-packing approach are new, nearly tight bounds on the number of near minimum cuts a graph may have and a new data structure for representing them in a space-efficient manner