1,588 research outputs found
Preventing Unraveling in Social Networks Gets Harder
The behavior of users in social networks is often observed to be affected by
the actions of their friends. Bhawalkar et al. \cite{bhawalkar-icalp}
introduced a formal mathematical model for user engagement in social networks
where each individual derives a benefit proportional to the number of its
friends which are engaged. Given a threshold degree the equilibrium for
this model is a maximal subgraph whose minimum degree is . However the
dropping out of individuals with degrees less than might lead to a
cascading effect of iterated withdrawals such that the size of equilibrium
subgraph becomes very small. To overcome this some special vertices called
"anchors" are introduced: these vertices need not have large degree. Bhawalkar
et al. \cite{bhawalkar-icalp} considered the \textsc{Anchored -Core}
problem: Given a graph and integers and do there exist a set of
vertices such that and
every vertex has degree at least is the induced
subgraph . They showed that the problem is NP-hard for and gave
some inapproximability and fixed-parameter intractability results. In this
paper we give improved hardness results for this problem. In particular we show
that the \textsc{Anchored -Core} problem is W[1]-hard parameterized by ,
even for . This improves the result of Bhawalkar et al.
\cite{bhawalkar-icalp} (who show W[2]-hardness parameterized by ) as our
parameter is always bigger since . Then we answer a question of
Bhawalkar et al. \cite{bhawalkar-icalp} by showing that the \textsc{Anchored
-Core} problem remains NP-hard on planar graphs for all , even if
the maximum degree of the graph is . Finally we show that the problem is
FPT on planar graphs parameterized by for all .Comment: To appear in AAAI 201
The Graph Motif problem parameterized by the structure of the input graph
The Graph Motif problem was introduced in 2006 in the context of biological
networks. It consists of deciding whether or not a multiset of colors occurs in
a connected subgraph of a vertex-colored graph. Graph Motif has been mostly
analyzed from the standpoint of parameterized complexity. The main parameters
which came into consideration were the size of the multiset and the number of
colors. Though, in the many applications of Graph Motif, the input graph
originates from real-life and has structure. Motivated by this prosaic
observation, we systematically study its complexity relatively to graph
structural parameters. For a wide range of parameters, we give new or improved
FPT algorithms, or show that the problem remains intractable. For the FPT
cases, we also give some kernelization lower bounds as well as some ETH-based
lower bounds on the worst case running time. Interestingly, we establish that
Graph Motif is W[1]-hard (while in W[P]) for parameter max leaf number, which
is, to the best of our knowledge, the first problem to behave this way.Comment: 24 pages, accepted in DAM, conference version in IPEC 201
Axioms for graph clustering quality functions
We investigate properties that intuitively ought to be satisfied by graph
clustering quality functions, that is, functions that assign a score to a
clustering of a graph. Graph clustering, also known as network community
detection, is often performed by optimizing such a function. Two axioms
tailored for graph clustering quality functions are introduced, and the four
axioms introduced in previous work on distance based clustering are
reformulated and generalized for the graph setting. We show that modularity, a
standard quality function for graph clustering, does not satisfy all of these
six properties. This motivates the derivation of a new family of quality
functions, adaptive scale modularity, which does satisfy the proposed axioms.
Adaptive scale modularity has two parameters, which give greater flexibility in
the kinds of clusterings that can be found. Standard graph clustering quality
functions, such as normalized cut and unnormalized cut, are obtained as special
cases of adaptive scale modularity.
In general, the results of our investigation indicate that the considered
axiomatic framework covers existing `good' quality functions for graph
clustering, and can be used to derive an interesting new family of quality
functions.Comment: 23 pages. Full text and sources available on:
http://www.cs.ru.nl/~T.vanLaarhoven/graph-clustering-axioms-2014
Fine-grained Search Space Classification for Hard Enumeration Variants of Subset Problems
We propose a simple, powerful, and flexible machine learning framework for
(i) reducing the search space of computationally difficult enumeration variants
of subset problems and (ii) augmenting existing state-of-the-art solvers with
informative cues arising from the input distribution. We instantiate our
framework for the problem of listing all maximum cliques in a graph, a central
problem in network analysis, data mining, and computational biology. We
demonstrate the practicality of our approach on real-world networks with
millions of vertices and edges by not only retaining all optimal solutions, but
also aggressively pruning the input instance size resulting in several fold
speedups of state-of-the-art algorithms. Finally, we explore the limits of
scalability and robustness of our proposed framework, suggesting that
supervised learning is viable for tackling NP-hard problems in practice.Comment: AAAI 201
Solving Vertex Cover in Polynomial Time on Hyperbolic Random Graphs
The VertexCover problem is proven to be computationally hard in different ways: It is NP-complete to find an optimal solution and even NP-hard to find an approximation with reasonable factors. In contrast, recent experiments suggest that on many real-world networks the run time to solve VertexCover is way smaller than even the best known FPT-approaches can explain. Similarly, greedy algorithms deliver very good approximations to the optimal solution in practice.
We link these observations to two properties that are observed in many real-world networks, namely a heterogeneous degree distribution and high clustering. To formalize these properties and explain the observed behavior, we analyze how a branch-and-reduce algorithm performs on hyperbolic random graphs, which have become increasingly popular for modeling real-world networks. In fact, we are able to show that the VertexCover problem on hyperbolic random graphs can be solved in polynomial time, with high probability.
The proof relies on interesting structural properties of hyperbolic random graphs. Since these predictions of the model are interesting in their own right, we conducted experiments on real-world networks showing that these properties are also observed in practice. When utilizing the same structural properties in an adaptive greedy algorithm, further experiments suggest that, on real instances, this leads to better approximations than the standard greedy approach within reasonable time
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