Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure for the Maximum Co-k-plex Problem

The focus of this thesis is a degree based relaxation of independent sets in graphs called co-k-plexes and the related combinatorial optimization problem of finding a maximum cardinality co-k-plex in G. This thesis develops a metaheuristic approach for solving the maximum co-k-plex problem which is known to be NP-hard. The approach is further extended for finding a maximum weighted co-k-plex in G where vertices of G are associated with specific weights. As the maximum co-k-plex problem in G is equivalent to the maximum k-plex problem in complement graph of G, many applications of this problem can be found in clustering and data mining social networks, biological networks, internet graphs and stock market graphs among others. In this thesis, a Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP) is developed to solve the maximum co-k-plex and maximum weighted co-k-plex problems. Computational experiments are performed to study the effectiveness of the proposed metaheuristic on benchmark instances. Finally, the performance of the developed GRASP algorithms for both versions was confirmed by comparing the running time and solution quality with results obtained by an exact algorithm.Industrial Engineering & Managemen

A Fast Algorithm to Compute Maximum k-Plexes in Social Network Analysis

A clique model is one of the most important techniques on the cohesive subgraph detection; however, its applications are rather limited due to restrictive conditions of the model. Hence much research resorts to k-plex — a graph in which any vertex is adjacent to all but at most k vertices — which is a relaxation model of the clique. In this paper, we study the maximum k-plex problem and propose a fast algorithm to compute maximum k-plexes by exploiting structural properties of the problem. In an n-vertex graph, the algorithm computes optimal solutions in cnnO(1) time for a constant c < 2 depending only on k. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first algorithm that breaks the trivial theoretical bound of 2n for each k ≥ 3. We also provide experimental results over multiple real-world social network instances in support

FPT algorithms for finding near-cliques in c-closed graphs

Finding large cliques or cliques missing a few edges is a fundamental algorithmic task in the study of real-world graphs, with applications in community detection, pattern recognition, and clustering. A number of effective backtracking-based heuristics for these problems have emerged from recent empirical work in social network analysis. Given the NP-hardness of variants of clique counting, these results raise a challenge for beyond worst-case analysis of these problems. Inspired by the triadic closure of real-world graphs, Fox et al. (SICOMP 2020) introduced the notion of c-closed graphs and proved that maximal clique enumeration is fixed-parameter tractable with respect to c. In practice, due to noise in data, one wishes to actually discover “near-cliques”, which can be characterized as cliques with a sparse subgraph removed. In this work, we prove that many different kinds of maximal near-cliques can be enumerated in polynomial time (and FPT in c) for c-closed graphs. We study various established notions of such substructures, including k-plexes, complements of bounded-degeneracy and bounded-treewidth graphs. Interestingly, our algorithms follow relatively simple backtracking procedures, analogous to what is done in practice. Our results underscore the significance of the c-closed graph class for theoretical understanding of social network analysis

Correlating Theory and Practice in Finding Clubs and Plexes

For solving NP-hard problems there is often a huge gap between theoretical guarantees and observed running times on real-world instances. As a first step towards tackling this issue, we propose an approach to quantify the correlation between theoretical and observed running times. We use two NP-hard problems related to finding large "cliquish" subgraphs in a given graph as demonstration of this measure. More precisely, we focus on finding maximum s-clubs and s-plexes, i. e., graphs of diameter s and graphs where each vertex is adjacent to all but s vertices. Preprocessing based on Turing kernelization is a standard tool to tackle these problems, especially on sparse graphs. We provide a parameterized analysis for the Turing kernelization and demonstrate their usefulness in practice. Moreover, we demonstrate that our measure indeed captures the correlation between these new theoretical and the observed running times

A Fast Maximum kk-Plex Algorithm Parameterized by the Degeneracy Gap

Given a graph, the $k$-plex is a vertex set in which each vertex is not adjacent to at most $k-1$ other vertices in the set. The maximum $k$-plex problem, which asks for the largest $k$-plex from a given graph, is an important but computationally challenging problem in applications like graph search and community detection. So far, there is a number of empirical algorithms without sufficient theoretical explanations on the efficiency. We try to bridge this gap by defining a novel parameter of the input instance, $g_k(G)$, the gap between the degeneracy bound and the size of maximum $k$-plex in the given graph, and presenting an exact algorithm parameterized by $g_k(G)$. In other words, we design an algorithm with running time polynomial in the size of input graph and exponential in $g_k(G)$ where $k$ is a constant. Usually, $g_k(G)$ is small and bounded by $O(\log{(|V|)})$ in real-world graphs, indicating that the algorithm runs in polynomial time. We also carry out massive experiments and show that the algorithm is competitive with the state-of-the-art solvers. Additionally, for large $k$ values such as $15$ and $20$, our algorithm has superior performance over existing algorithms.Comment: IJCAI'202