85 research outputs found
Inapproximability of Maximum Biclique Problems, Minimum -Cut and Densest At-Least--Subgraph from the Small Set Expansion Hypothesis
The Small Set Expansion Hypothesis (SSEH) is a conjecture which roughly
states that it is NP-hard to distinguish between a graph with a small subset of
vertices whose edge expansion is almost zero and one in which all small subsets
of vertices have expansion almost one. In this work, we prove inapproximability
results for the following graph problems based on this hypothesis:
- Maximum Edge Biclique (MEB): given a bipartite graph , find a complete
bipartite subgraph of with maximum number of edges.
- Maximum Balanced Biclique (MBB): given a bipartite graph , find a
balanced complete bipartite subgraph of with maximum number of vertices.
- Minimum -Cut: given a weighted graph , find a set of edges with
minimum total weight whose removal partitions into connected
components.
- Densest At-Least--Subgraph (DALS): given a weighted graph , find a
set of at least vertices such that the induced subgraph on has
maximum density (the ratio between the total weight of edges and the number of
vertices).
We show that, assuming SSEH and NP BPP, no polynomial time
algorithm gives -approximation for MEB or MBB for every
constant . Moreover, assuming SSEH, we show that it is NP-hard
to approximate Minimum -Cut and DALS to within factor
of the optimum for every constant .
The ratios in our results are essentially tight since trivial algorithms give
-approximation to both MEB and MBB and efficient -approximation
algorithms are known for Minimum -Cut [SV95] and DALS [And07, KS09].
Our first result is proved by combining a technique developed by Raghavendra
et al. [RST12] to avoid locality of gadget reductions with a generalization of
Bansal and Khot's long code test [BK09] whereas our second result is shown via
elementary reductions.Comment: A preliminary version of this work will appear at ICALP 2017 under a
different title "Inapproximability of Maximum Edge Biclique, Maximum Balanced
Biclique and Minimum k-Cut from the Small Set Expansion Hypothesis
Finding Connected Dense -Subgraphs
Given a connected graph on vertices and a positive integer ,
a subgraph of on vertices is called a -subgraph in . We design
combinatorial approximation algorithms for finding a connected -subgraph in
such that its density is at least a factor
of the density of the densest -subgraph
in (which is not necessarily connected). These particularly provide the
first non-trivial approximations for the densest connected -subgraph problem
on general graphs
Detecting High Log-Densities -- an O(n^1/4) Approximation for Densest k-Subgraph
In the Densest k-Subgraph problem, given a graph G and a parameter k, one
needs to find a subgraph of G induced on k vertices that contains the largest
number of edges. There is a significant gap between the best known upper and
lower bounds for this problem. It is NP-hard, and does not have a PTAS unless
NP has subexponential time algorithms. On the other hand, the current best
known algorithm of Feige, Kortsarz and Peleg, gives an approximation ratio of
n^(1/3-epsilon) for some specific epsilon > 0 (estimated at around 1/60).
We present an algorithm that for every epsilon > 0 approximates the Densest
k-Subgraph problem within a ratio of n^(1/4+epsilon) in time n^O(1/epsilon). In
particular, our algorithm achieves an approximation ratio of O(n^1/4) in time
n^O(log n). Our algorithm is inspired by studying an average-case version of
the problem where the goal is to distinguish random graphs from graphs with
planted dense subgraphs. The approximation ratio we achieve for the general
case matches the distinguishing ratio we obtain for this planted problem.
At a high level, our algorithms involve cleverly counting appropriately
defined trees of constant size in G, and using these counts to identify the
vertices of the dense subgraph. Our algorithm is based on the following
principle. We say that a graph G(V,E) has log-density alpha if its average
degree is Theta(|V|^alpha). The algorithmic core of our result is a family of
algorithms that output k-subgraphs of nontrivial density whenever the
log-density of the densest k-subgraph is larger than the log-density of the
host graph.Comment: 23 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
, find a subset of vertices such that , where is the number of triangles induced
by the set . 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 -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
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