Fully Dynamic Single-Source Reachability in Practice: An Experimental Study

Given a directed graph and a source vertex, the fully dynamic single-source reachability problem is to maintain the set of vertices that are reachable from the given vertex, subject to edge deletions and insertions. It is one of the most fundamental problems on graphs and appears directly or indirectly in many and varied applications. While there has been theoretical work on this problem, showing both linear conditional lower bounds for the fully dynamic problem and insertions-only and deletions-only upper bounds beating these conditional lower bounds, there has been no experimental study that compares the performance of fully dynamic reachability algorithms in practice. Previous experimental studies in this area concentrated only on the more general all-pairs reachability or transitive closure problem and did not use real-world dynamic graphs. In this paper, we bridge this gap by empirically studying an extensive set of algorithms for the single-source reachability problem in the fully dynamic setting. In particular, we design several fully dynamic variants of well-known approaches to obtain and maintain reachability information with respect to a distinguished source. Moreover, we extend the existing insertions-only or deletions-only upper bounds into fully dynamic algorithms. Even though the worst-case time per operation of all the fully dynamic algorithms we evaluate is at least linear in the number of edges in the graph (as is to be expected given the conditional lower bounds) we show in our extensive experimental evaluation that their performance differs greatly, both on generated as well as on real-world instances

Dynamic Parameterized Problems

In this work, we study the parameterized complexity of various classical graph-theoretic problems in the dynamic framework where the input graph is being updated by a sequence of edge additions and deletions. Vertex subset problems on graphs typically deal with finding a subset of vertices having certain properties that are of interest to us. In real-world applications, the graph under consideration often changes over time and due to this dynamics, the solution at hand might lose the desired properties. The goal in the area of dynamic graph algorithms is to efficiently maintain a solution under these changes. Recomputing a new solution on the new graph is an expensive task especially when the number of modifications made to the graph is significantly smaller than the size of the graph. In the context of parameterized algorithms, two natural parameters are the size k of the symmetric difference of the edge sets of the two graphs (on n vertices) and the size r of the symmetric difference of the two solutions. We study the Dynamic Pi-Deletion problem which is the dynamic variant of the Pi-Deletion problem and show NP-hardness, fixed-parameter tractability and kernelization results. For specific cases of Dynamic Pi-Deletion such as Dynamic Vertex Cover and Dynamic Feedback Vertex Set, we describe improved FPT algorithms and give linear kernels. Specifically, we show that Dynamic Vertex Cover admits algorithms with running times 1.1740^k*n^{O(1)} (polynomial space) and 1.1277^k*n^{O(1)} (exponential space). Then, we show that Dynamic Feedback Vertex Set admits a randomized algorithm with 1.6667^k*n^{O(1)} running time. Finally, we consider Dynamic Connected Vertex Cover, Dynamic Dominating Set and Dynamic Connected Dominating Set and describe algorithms with 2^k*n^{O(1)} running time improving over the known running time bounds for these problems. Additionally, for Dynamic Dominating Set and Dynamic Connected Dominating Set, we show that this is the optimal running time (up to polynomial factors) assuming the Set Cover Conjecture

Dynamic Graph Stream Algorithms in o(n)o(n) Space

In this paper we study graph problems in dynamic streaming model, where the input is defined by a sequence of edge insertions and deletions. As many natural problems require $\Omega(n)$ space, where $n$ is the number of vertices, existing works mainly focused on designing $\tilde{O}(n)$ space algorithms. Although sublinear in the number of edges for dense graphs, it could still be too large for many applications (e.g. $n$ is huge or the graph is sparse). In this work, we give single-pass algorithms beating this space barrier for two classes of problems. We present $o(n)$ space algorithms for estimating the number of connected components with additive error $\varepsilon n$ and $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximating the weight of minimum spanning tree, for any small constant $\varepsilon>0$. The latter improves previous $\tilde{O}(n)$ space algorithm given by Ahn et al. (SODA 2012) for connected graphs with bounded edge weights. We initiate the study of approximate graph property testing in the dynamic streaming model, where we want to distinguish graphs satisfying the property from graphs that are $\varepsilon$-far from having the property. We consider the problem of testing $k$-edge connectivity, $k$-vertex connectivity, cycle-freeness and bipartiteness (of planar graphs), for which, we provide algorithms using roughly $\tilde{O}(n^{1-\varepsilon})$ space, which is $o(n)$ for any constant $\varepsilon$. To complement our algorithms, we present $\Omega(n^{1-O(\varepsilon)})$ space lower bounds for these problems, which show that such a dependence on $\varepsilon$ is necessary.Comment: ICALP 201

Average Sensitivity of Graph Algorithms

In modern applications of graphs algorithms, where the graphs of interest are large and dynamic, it is unrealistic to assume that an input representation contains the full information of a graph being studied. Hence, it is desirable to use algorithms that, even when only a (large) subgraph is available, output solutions that are close to the solutions output when the whole graph is available. We formalize this idea by introducing the notion of average sensitivity of graph algorithms, which is the average earth mover's distance between the output distributions of an algorithm on a graph and its subgraph obtained by removing an edge, where the average is over the edges removed and the distance between two outputs is the Hamming distance. In this work, we initiate a systematic study of average sensitivity. After deriving basic properties of average sensitivity such as composition, we provide efficient approximation algorithms with low average sensitivities for concrete graph problems, including the minimum spanning forest problem, the global minimum cut problem, the minimum $s$-$t$ cut problem, and the maximum matching problem. In addition, we prove that the average sensitivity of our global minimum cut algorithm is almost optimal, by showing a nearly matching lower bound. We also show that every algorithm for the 2-coloring problem has average sensitivity linear in the number of vertices. One of the main ideas involved in designing our algorithms with low average sensitivity is the following fact; if the presence of a vertex or an edge in the solution output by an algorithm can be decided locally, then the algorithm has a low average sensitivity, allowing us to reuse the analyses of known sublinear-time algorithms and local computation algorithms (LCAs). Using this connection, we show that every LCA for 2-coloring has linear query complexity, thereby answering an open question.Comment: 39 pages, 1 figur

Dynamic Dominators and Low-High Orders in DAGs

We consider practical algorithms for maintaining the dominator tree and a low-high order in directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) subject to dynamic operations. Let G be a directed graph with a distinguished start vertex s. The dominator tree D of G is a tree rooted at s, such that a vertex v is an ancestor of a vertex w if and only if all paths from s to w in G include v. The dominator tree is a central tool in program optimization and code generation, and has many applications in other diverse areas including constraint programming, circuit testing, biology, and in algorithms for graph connectivity problems. A low-high order of G is a preorder of D that certifies the correctness of D, and has further applications in connectivity and path-determination problems. We first provide a practical and carefully engineered version of a recent algorithm [ICALP 2017] for maintaining the dominator tree of a DAG through a sequence of edge deletions. The algorithm runs in O(mn) total time and O(m) space, where n is the number of vertices and m is the number of edges before any deletion. In addition, we present a new algorithm that maintains a low-high order of a DAG under edge deletions within the same bounds. Both results extend to the case of reducible graphs (a class that includes DAGs). Furthermore, we present a fully dynamic algorithm for maintaining the dominator tree of a DAG under an intermixed sequence of edge insertions and deletions. Although it does not maintain the O(mn) worst-case bound of the decremental algorithm, our experiments highlight that the fully dynamic algorithm performs very well in practice. Finally, we study the practical efficiency of all our algorithms by conducting an extensive experimental study on real-world and synthetic graphs