The Densest k-Subhypergraph Problem

The Densest $k$-Subgraph (D$k$S) problem, and its corresponding minimization problem Smallest $p$-Edge Subgraph (S$p$ES), have come to play a central role in approximation algorithms. This is due both to their practical importance, and their usefulness as a tool for solving and establishing approximation bounds for other problems. These two problems are not well understood, and it is widely believed that they do not an admit a subpolynomial approximation ratio (although the best known hardness results do not rule this out). In this paper we generalize both D$k$S and S$p$ES from graphs to hypergraphs. We consider the Densest $k$-Subhypergraph problem (given a hypergraph $(V, E)$, find a subset $W\subseteq V$ of $k$ vertices so as to maximize the number of hyperedges contained in $W$) and define the Minimum $p$-Union problem (given a hypergraph, choose $p$ of the hyperedges so as to minimize the number of vertices in their union). We focus in particular on the case where all hyperedges have size 3, as this is the simplest non-graph setting. For this case we provide an $O(n^{4(4-\sqrt{3})/13 + \epsilon}) \leq O(n^{0.697831+\epsilon})$-approximation (for arbitrary constant $\epsilon > 0$) for Densest $k$-Subhypergraph and an $\tilde O(n^{2/5})$-approximation for Minimum $p$-Union. We also give an $O(\sqrt{m})$-approximation for Minimum $p$-Union in general hypergraphs. Finally, we examine the interesting special case of interval hypergraphs (instances where the vertices are a subset of the natural numbers and the hyperedges are intervals of the line) and prove that both problems admit an exact polynomial time solution on these instances.Comment: 21 page

A Novel Approach to Finding Near-Cliques: The Triangle-Densest Subgraph Problem

Many graph mining applications rely on detecting subgraphs which are near-cliques. There exists a dichotomy between the results in the existing work related to this problem: on the one hand the densest subgraph problem (DSP) which maximizes the average degree over all subgraphs is solvable in polynomial time but for many networks fails to find subgraphs which are near-cliques. On the other hand, formulations that are geared towards finding near-cliques are NP-hard and frequently inapproximable due to connections with the Maximum Clique problem. In this work, we propose a formulation which combines the best of both worlds: it is solvable in polynomial time and finds near-cliques when the DSP fails. Surprisingly, our formulation is a simple variation of the DSP. Specifically, we define the triangle densest subgraph problem (TDSP): given $G(V,E)$, find a subset of vertices $S^*$ such that $\tau(S^*)=\max_{S \subseteq V} \frac{t(S)}{|S|}$, where $t(S)$ is the number of triangles induced by the set $S$. We provide various exact and approximation algorithms which the solve the TDSP efficiently. Furthermore, we show how our algorithms adapt to the more general problem of maximizing the $k$-clique average density. Finally, we provide empirical evidence that the TDSP should be used whenever the output of the DSP fails to output a near-clique.Comment: 42 page

Densest Subgraph in Dynamic Graph Streams

In this paper, we consider the problem of approximating the densest subgraph in the dynamic graph stream model. In this model of computation, the input graph is defined by an arbitrary sequence of edge insertions and deletions and the goal is to analyze properties of the resulting graph given memory that is sub-linear in the size of the stream. We present a single-pass algorithm that returns a $(1+\epsilon)$ approximation of the maximum density with high probability; the algorithm uses O(\epsilon^{-2} n \polylog n) space, processes each stream update in \polylog (n) time, and uses \poly(n) post-processing time where $n$ is the number of nodes. The space used by our algorithm matches the lower bound of Bahmani et al.~(PVLDB 2012) up to a poly-logarithmic factor for constant $\epsilon$. The best existing results for this problem were established recently by Bhattacharya et al.~(STOC 2015). They presented a $(2+\epsilon)$ approximation algorithm using similar space and another algorithm that both processed each update and maintained a $(4+\epsilon)$ approximation of the current maximum density in \polylog (n) time per-update.Comment: To appear in MFCS 201

Fully Dynamic Algorithm for Top-kk Densest Subgraphs

Given a large graph, the densest-subgraph problem asks to find a subgraph with maximum average degree. When considering the top-$k$ version of this problem, a na\"ive solution is to iteratively find the densest subgraph and remove it in each iteration. However, such a solution is impractical due to high processing cost. The problem is further complicated when dealing with dynamic graphs, since adding or removing an edge requires re-running the algorithm. In this paper, we study the top-$k$ densest-subgraph problem in the sliding-window model and propose an efficient fully-dynamic algorithm. The input of our algorithm consists of an edge stream, and the goal is to find the node-disjoint subgraphs that maximize the sum of their densities. In contrast to existing state-of-the-art solutions that require iterating over the entire graph upon any update, our algorithm profits from the observation that updates only affect a limited region of the graph. Therefore, the top-$k$ densest subgraphs are maintained by only applying local updates. We provide a theoretical analysis of the proposed algorithm and show empirically that the algorithm often generates denser subgraphs than state-of-the-art competitors. Experiments show an improvement in efficiency of up to five orders of magnitude compared to state-of-the-art solutions.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, accepted at CIKM 201

Robust Densest Subgraph Discovery

Dense subgraph discovery is an important primitive in graph mining, which has a wide variety of applications in diverse domains. In the densest subgraph problem, given an undirected graph $G=(V,E)$ with an edge-weight vector $w=(w_e)_{e\in E}$, we aim to find $S\subseteq V$ that maximizes the density, i.e., $w(S)/|S|$, where $w(S)$ is the sum of the weights of the edges in the subgraph induced by $S$. Although the densest subgraph problem is one of the most well-studied optimization problems for dense subgraph discovery, there is an implicit strong assumption; it is assumed that the weights of all the edges are known exactly as input. In real-world applications, there are often cases where we have only uncertain information of the edge weights. In this study, we provide a framework for dense subgraph discovery under the uncertainty of edge weights. Specifically, we address such an uncertainty issue using the theory of robust optimization. First, we formulate our fundamental problem, the robust densest subgraph problem, and present a simple algorithm. We then formulate the robust densest subgraph problem with sampling oracle that models dense subgraph discovery using an edge-weight sampling oracle, and present an algorithm with a strong theoretical performance guarantee. Computational experiments using both synthetic graphs and popular real-world graphs demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms.Comment: 10 pages; Accepted to ICDM 201

Finding Connected Dense kk-Subgraphs

Given a connected graph $G$ on $n$ vertices and a positive integer $k\le n$, a subgraph of $G$ on $k$ vertices is called a $k$-subgraph in $G$. We design combinatorial approximation algorithms for finding a connected $k$-subgraph in $G$ such that its density is at least a factor $\Omega(\max\{n^{-2/5},k^2/n^2\})$ of the density of the densest $k$-subgraph in $G$ (which is not necessarily connected). These particularly provide the first non-trivial approximations for the densest connected $k$-subgraph problem on general graphs