Parameterized Algorithms for Partitioning Graphs into Highly Connected Clusters

Clustering is a well-known and important problem with numerous applications. The graph-based model is one of the typical cluster models. In the graph model generally clusters are defined as cliques. However, such approach might be too restrictive as in some applications, not all objects from the same cluster must be connected. That is why different types of cliques relaxations often considered as clusters. In our work, we consider a problem of partitioning graph into clusters and a problem of isolating cluster of a special type where by cluster we mean highly connected subgraph. Initially, such clusterization was proposed by Hartuv and Shamir. And their HCS clustering algorithm was extensively applied in practice. It was used to cluster cDNA fingerprints, to find complexes in protein-protein interaction data, to group protein sequences hierarchically into superfamily and family clusters, to find families of regulatory RNA structures. The HCS algorithm partitions graph in highly connected subgraphs. However, it is achieved by deletion of not necessarily the minimum number of edges. In our work, we try to minimize the number of edge deletions. We consider problems from the parameterized point of view where the main parameter is a number of allowed edge deletions. The presented algorithms significantly improve previous known running times for the Highly Connected Deletion (improved from cOsleft(81^kright) to cOsleft(3^kright)), Isolated Highly Connected Subgraph (from cOs(4^k) to cOsleft(k^{cOleft(k^{sfrac{2}{3}}right)}right) ), Seeded Highly Connected Edge Deletion (from cOsleft(16^{k^{sfrac{3}{4}}}right) to cOsleft(k^{sqrt{k}}right)) problems. Furthermore, we present a subexponential algorithm for Highly Connected Deletion problem if the number of clusters is bounded. Overall our work contains three subexponential algorithms which is unusual as very recently there were known very few problems admitting subexponential algorithms

Clustering and Community Detection with Imbalanced Clusters

Spectral clustering methods which are frequently used in clustering and community detection applications are sensitive to the specific graph constructions particularly when imbalanced clusters are present. We show that ratio cut (RCut) or normalized cut (NCut) objectives are not tailored to imbalanced cluster sizes since they tend to emphasize cut sizes over cut values. We propose a graph partitioning problem that seeks minimum cut partitions under minimum size constraints on partitions to deal with imbalanced cluster sizes. Our approach parameterizes a family of graphs by adaptively modulating node degrees on a fixed node set, yielding a set of parameter dependent cuts reflecting varying levels of imbalance. The solution to our problem is then obtained by optimizing over these parameters. We present rigorous limit cut analysis results to justify our approach and demonstrate the superiority of our method through experiments on synthetic and real datasets for data clustering, semi-supervised learning and community detection.Comment: Extended version of arXiv:1309.2303 with new applications. Accepted to IEEE TSIP

Spectral Clustering with Imbalanced Data

Spectral clustering is sensitive to how graphs are constructed from data particularly when proximal and imbalanced clusters are present. We show that Ratio-Cut (RCut) or normalized cut (NCut) objectives are not tailored to imbalanced data since they tend to emphasize cut sizes over cut values. We propose a graph partitioning problem that seeks minimum cut partitions under minimum size constraints on partitions to deal with imbalanced data. Our approach parameterizes a family of graphs, by adaptively modulating node degrees on a fixed node set, to yield a set of parameter dependent cuts reflecting varying levels of imbalance. The solution to our problem is then obtained by optimizing over these parameters. We present rigorous limit cut analysis results to justify our approach. We demonstrate the superiority of our method through unsupervised and semi-supervised experiments on synthetic and real data sets.Comment: 24 pages, 7 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1302.513

Open Problems in (Hyper)Graph Decomposition

Large networks are useful in a wide range of applications. Sometimes problem instances are composed of billions of entities. Decomposing and analyzing these structures helps us gain new insights about our surroundings. Even if the final application concerns a different problem (such as traversal, finding paths, trees, and flows), decomposing large graphs is often an important subproblem for complexity reduction or parallelization. This report is a summary of discussions that happened at Dagstuhl seminar 23331 on "Recent Trends in Graph Decomposition" and presents currently open problems and future directions in the area of (hyper)graph decomposition

Recent Advances in Graph Partitioning

We survey recent trends in practical algorithms for balanced graph partitioning together with applications and future research directions

Unifying Sparsest Cut, Cluster Deletion, and Modularity Clustering Objectives with Correlation Clustering

Graph clustering, or community detection, is the task of identifying groups of closely related objects in a large network. In this paper we introduce a new community-detection framework called LambdaCC that is based on a specially weighted version of correlation clustering. A key component in our methodology is a clustering resolution parameter, $\lambda$, which implicitly controls the size and structure of clusters formed by our framework. We show that, by increasing this parameter, our objective effectively interpolates between two different strategies in graph clustering: finding a sparse cut and forming dense subgraphs. Our methodology unifies and generalizes a number of other important clustering quality functions including modularity, sparsest cut, and cluster deletion, and places them all within the context of an optimization problem that has been well studied from the perspective of approximation algorithms. Our approach is particularly relevant in the regime of finding dense clusters, as it leads to a 2-approximation for the cluster deletion problem. We use our approach to cluster several graphs, including large collaboration networks and social networks