6,608 research outputs found
Statistical mechanics of the vertex-cover problem
We review recent progress in the study of the vertex-cover problem (VC). VC
belongs to the class of NP-complete graph theoretical problems, which plays a
central role in theoretical computer science. On ensembles of random graphs, VC
exhibits an coverable-uncoverable phase transition. Very close to this
transition, depending on the solution algorithm, easy-hard transitions in the
typical running time of the algorithms occur.
We explain a statistical mechanics approach, which works by mapping VC to a
hard-core lattice gas, and then applying techniques like the replica trick or
the cavity approach. Using these methods, the phase diagram of VC could be
obtained exactly for connectivities , where VC is replica symmetric.
Recently, this result could be confirmed using traditional mathematical
techniques. For , the solution of VC exhibits full replica symmetry
breaking.
The statistical mechanics approach can also be used to study analytically the
typical running time of simple complete and incomplete algorithms for VC.
Finally, we describe recent results for VC when studied on other ensembles of
finite- and infinite-dimensional graphs.Comment: review article, 26 pages, 9 figures, to appear in J. Phys. A: Math.
Ge
The -matching problem on bipartite graphs
The -matching problem on bipartite graphs is studied with a local
algorithm. A -matching () on a bipartite graph is a set of matched
edges, in which each vertex of one type is adjacent to at most matched edge
and each vertex of the other type is adjacent to at most matched edges. The
-matching problem on a given bipartite graph concerns finding -matchings
with the maximum size. Our approach to this combinatorial optimization are of
two folds. From an algorithmic perspective, we adopt a local algorithm as a
linear approximate solver to find -matchings on general bipartite graphs,
whose basic component is a generalized version of the greedy leaf removal
procedure in graph theory. From an analytical perspective, in the case of
random bipartite graphs with the same size of two types of vertices, we develop
a mean-field theory for the percolation phenomenon underlying the local
algorithm, leading to a theoretical estimation of -matching sizes on
coreless graphs. We hope that our results can shed light on further study on
algorithms and computational complexity of the optimization problem.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figure
Critical phenomena in complex networks
The combination of the compactness of networks, featuring small diameters,
and their complex architectures results in a variety of critical effects
dramatically different from those in cooperative systems on lattices. In the
last few years, researchers have made important steps toward understanding the
qualitatively new critical phenomena in complex networks. We review the
results, concepts, and methods of this rapidly developing field. Here we mostly
consider two closely related classes of these critical phenomena, namely
structural phase transitions in the network architectures and transitions in
cooperative models on networks as substrates. We also discuss systems where a
network and interacting agents on it influence each other. We overview a wide
range of critical phenomena in equilibrium and growing networks including the
birth of the giant connected component, percolation, k-core percolation,
phenomena near epidemic thresholds, condensation transitions, critical
phenomena in spin models placed on networks, synchronization, and
self-organized criticality effects in interacting systems on networks. We also
discuss strong finite size effects in these systems and highlight open problems
and perspectives.Comment: Review article, 79 pages, 43 figures, 1 table, 508 references,
extende
Three Puzzles on Mathematics, Computation, and Games
In this lecture I will talk about three mathematical puzzles involving
mathematics and computation that have preoccupied me over the years. The first
puzzle is to understand the amazing success of the simplex algorithm for linear
programming. The second puzzle is about errors made when votes are counted
during elections. The third puzzle is: are quantum computers possible?Comment: ICM 2018 plenary lecture, Rio de Janeiro, 36 pages, 7 Figure
Construction of near-optimal vertex clique covering for real-world networks
We propose a method based on combining a constructive and a bounding heuristic to solve the vertex clique covering problem (CCP), where the aim is to partition the vertices of a graph into the smallest number of classes, which induce cliques. Searching for the solution to CCP is highly motivated by analysis of social and other real-world networks, applications in graph mining, as well as by the fact that CCP is one of the classical NP-hard problems. Combining the construction and the bounding heuristic helped us not only to find high-quality clique coverings but also to determine that in the domain of real-world networks, many of the obtained solutions are optimal, while the rest of them are near-optimal. In addition, the method has a polynomial time complexity and shows much promise for its practical use. Experimental results are presented for a fairly representative benchmark of real-world data. Our test graphs include extracts of web-based social networks, including some very large ones, several well-known graphs from network science, as well as coappearance networks of literary works' characters from the DIMACS graph coloring benchmark. We also present results for synthetic pseudorandom graphs structured according to the Erdös-Renyi model and Leighton's model
Topological properties and fractal analysis of recurrence network constructed from fractional Brownian motions
Many studies have shown that we can gain additional information on time
series by investigating their accompanying complex networks. In this work, we
investigate the fundamental topological and fractal properties of recurrence
networks constructed from fractional Brownian motions (FBMs). First, our
results indicate that the constructed recurrence networks have exponential
degree distributions; the relationship between and of recurrence networks decreases with the Hurst
index of the associated FBMs, and their dependence approximately satisfies
the linear formula . Moreover, our numerical results of
multifractal analysis show that the multifractality exists in these recurrence
networks, and the multifractality of these networks becomes stronger at first
and then weaker when the Hurst index of the associated time series becomes
larger from 0.4 to 0.95. In particular, the recurrence network with the Hurst
index possess the strongest multifractality. In addition, the
dependence relationships of the average information dimension on the Hurst index can also be
fitted well with linear functions. Our results strongly suggest that the
recurrence network inherits the basic characteristic and the fractal nature of
the associated FBM series.Comment: 25 pages, 1 table, 15 figures. accepted by Phys. Rev.
Distance Preserving Graph Simplification
Large graphs are difficult to represent, visualize, and understand. In this
paper, we introduce "gate graph" - a new approach to perform graph
simplification. A gate graph provides a simplified topological view of the
original graph. Specifically, we construct a gate graph from a large graph so
that for any "non-local" vertex pair (distance higher than some threshold) in
the original graph, their shortest-path distance can be recovered by
consecutive "local" walks through the gate vertices in the gate graph. We
perform a theoretical investigation on the gate-vertex set discovery problem.
We characterize its computational complexity and reveal the upper bound of
minimum gate-vertex set using VC-dimension theory. We propose an efficient
mining algorithm to discover a gate-vertex set with guaranteed logarithmic
bound. We further present a fast technique for pruning redundant edges in a
gate graph. The detailed experimental results using both real and synthetic
graphs demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.Comment: A short version of this paper will be published for ICDM'11, December
201
An Alon-Boppana Type Bound for Weighted Graphs and Lowerbounds for Spectral Sparsification
We prove the following Alon-Boppana type theorem for general (not necessarily
regular) weighted graphs: if is an -node weighted undirected graph of
average combinatorial degree (that is, has edges) and girth , and if are the
eigenvalues of the (non-normalized) Laplacian of , then (The Alon-Boppana theorem implies that if is unweighted and
-regular, then if the diameter is at least .)
Our result implies a lower bound for spectral sparsifiers. A graph is a
spectral -sparsifier of a graph if where is the Laplacian matrix of and is
the Laplacian matrix of . Batson, Spielman and Srivastava proved that for
every there is an -sparsifier of average degree where
and the edges of are a
(weighted) subset of the edges of . Batson, Spielman and Srivastava also
show that the bound on cannot be reduced below when is a clique; our Alon-Boppana-type result implies that
cannot be reduced below when comes
from a family of expanders of super-constant degree and super-constant girth.
The method of Batson, Spielman and Srivastava proves a more general result,
about sparsifying sums of rank-one matrices, and their method applies to an
"online" setting. We show that for the online matrix setting the bound is tight, up to lower order terms
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