We consider two optimization problems related to finding dense subgraphs. The densest at-least-k-subgraph problem (DalkS) is to find an induced subgraph of highest average degree among all subgraphs with at least k vertices, and the densest at-most-k-subgraph problem (DamkS) is defined similarly. These problems are related to the well-known densest k-subgraph problem (DkS), which is to find the densest subgraph on exactly k vertices. We show that DalkS can be approximated efficiently, while DamkS is nearly as hard to approximate as the densest k-subgraph problem.
Feige and Seltser @cite_9 showed the densest @math -subgraph problem is @math -complete when restricted to bipartite graphs of maximum degree 3, by a reduction from max-clique. This reduction does not produce a hardness of approximation result for DkS. In fact, they showed that if a graph contains a @math -clique, a subgraph with @math vertices and @math edges can be found in subexponential time. Khot @cite_4 proved there can be no PTAS for the densest @math -subgraph problem, under a standard complexity assumption.
@cite_9 @cite_4
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Numerous graph mining applications rely on detecting subgraphs which are large near-cliques. Since formulations that are geared towards finding large near-cliques are hard and frequently inapproximable due to connections with the Maximum Clique problem, the poly-time solvable densest subgraph problem which maximizes the average degree over all possible subgraphs "lies at the core of large scale data mining" [10]. However, frequently the densest subgraph problem fails in detecting large near-cliques in networks. In this work, we introduce the k-clique densest subgraph problem, k ≥ 2. This generalizes the well studied densest subgraph problem which is obtained as a special case for k=2. For k=3 we obtain a novel formulation which we refer to as the triangle densest subgraph problem: given a graph G(V,E), find a subset of vertices S* such that τ(S*)=max limitsS ⊆ V t(S) |S|, where t(S) is the number of triangles induced by the set S. On the theory side, we prove that for any k constant, there exist an exact polynomial time algorithm for the k-clique densest subgraph problem . Furthermore, we propose an efficient 1 k-approximation algorithm which generalizes the greedy peeling algorithm of Asahiro and Charikar [8,18] for k=2. Finally, we show how to implement efficiently this peeling framework on MapReduce for any k ≥ 3, generalizing the work of Bahmani, Kumar and Vassilvitskii for the case k=2 [10]. On the empirical side, our two main findings are that (i) the triangle densest subgraph is consistently closer to being a large near-clique compared to the densest subgraph and (ii) the peeling approximation algorithms for both k=2 and k=3 achieve on real-world networks approximation ratios closer to 1 rather than the pessimistic 1 k guarantee. An interesting consequence of our work is that triangle counting, a well-studied computational problem in the context of social network analysis can be used to detect large near-cliques. Finally, we evaluate our proposed method on a popular graph mining application. Extracting dense subgraphs from large graphs is a key primitive in a variety of graph mining applications, ranging from mining social networks and the Web graph to bioinformatics [41]. In this paper we focus on a family of poly-time solvable formulations, known as the k-clique densest subgraph problem (k-Clique-DSP) [57]. When k=2, the problem becomes the well-known densest subgraph problem (DSP) [22, 31, 33, 39]. Our main contribution is a sampling scheme that gives densest subgraph sparsifier, yielding a randomized algorithm that produces high-quality approximations while providing significant speedups and improved space complexity. We also extend this family of formulations to bipartite graphs by introducing the (p,q)-biclique densest subgraph problem ((p,q)-Biclique-DSP), and devise an exact algorithm that can treat both clique and biclique densities in a unified way. As an example of performance, our sparsifying algorithm extracts the 5-clique densest subgraph --which is a large-near clique on 62 vertices-- from a large collaboration network. Our algorithm achieves 100 accuracy over five runs, while achieving an average speedup factor of over 10,000. Specifically, we reduce the running time from ∼2 107 seconds to an average running time of 0.15 seconds. We also use our methods to study how the k-clique densest subgraphs change as a function of time in time-evolving networks for various small values of k. We observe significant deviations between the experimental findings on real-world networks and stochastic Kronecker graphs, a random graph model that mimics real-world networks in certain aspects. We believe that our work is a significant advance in routines with rigorous theoretical guarantees for scalable extraction of large near-cliques from networks. The densest subgraph problem, which asks for a subgraph with the maximum edges-to-vertices ratio d∗, is solvable in polynomial time. We discuss algorithms for this problem and the computation of a graph orientation with the lowest maximum indegree, which is equal to ⌈d∗⌉. This value also equals the pseudoarboricity of the graph. We show that it can be computed in O(|E| √ log log d∗) time, and that better estimates can be given for graph classes where d∗ satisfies certain asymptotic bounds. These runtimes are achieved by accelerating a binary search with an approximation scheme, and a runtime analysis of Dinitz’s algorithm on flow networks where all arcs, except the source and sink arcs, have unit capacity. We experimentally compare implementations of various algorithms for the densest subgraph and pseudoarboricity problems. In flow-based algorithms, Dinitz’s algorithm performs significantly better than push-relabel algorithms on all instances tested. We consider the problem of finding dense subgraphs with specified upper or lower bounds on the number of vertices. We introduce two optimization problems: the densest at-least-k-subgraph problem (dalks), which is to find an induced subgraph of highest average degree among all subgraphs with at least k vertices, and the densest at-most-k-subgraph problem (damks), which is defined similarly. These problems are relaxed versions of the well-known densest k-subgraph problem (dks), which is to find the densest subgraph with exactly k vertices. Our main result is that dalks can be approximated efficiently, even for web-scale graphs. We give a (1 3)-approximation algorithm for dalks that is based on the core decomposition of a graph, and that runs in time O(m + n), where n is the number of nodes and m is the number of edges. In contrast, we show that damks is nearly as hard to approximate as the densest k-subgraph problem, for which no good approximation algorithm is known. In particular, we show that if there exists a polynomial time approximation algorithm for damks with approximation ratio γ, then there is a polynomial time approximation algorithm for dks with approximation ratio γ 2 8. In the experimental section, we test the algorithm for dalks on large publicly available web graphs. We observe that, in addition to producing near-optimal solutions for dalks, the algorithm also produces near-optimal solutions for dks for nearly all values of k. Given an undirected graph G = (V ,E ), the density of a subgraph on vertex set S is defined as @math , where E (S ) is the set of edges in the subgraph induced by nodes in S . Finding subgraphs of maximum density is a very well studied problem. One can also generalize this notion to directed graphs. For a directed graph one notion of density given by Kannan and Vinay [12] is as follows: given subsets S and T of vertices, the density of the subgraph is @math , where E (S ,T ) is the set of edges going from S to T . Without any size constraints, a subgraph of maximum density can be found in polynomial time. When we require the subgraph to have a specified size, the problem of finding a maximum density subgraph becomes NP -hard. In this paper we focus on developing fast polynomial time algorithms for several variations of dense subgraph problems for both directed and undirected graphs. When there is no size bound, we extend the flow based technique for obtaining a densest subgraph in directed graphs and also give a linear time 2-approximation algorithm for it. When a size lower bound is specified for both directed and undirected cases, we show that the problem is NP-complete and give fast algorithms to find subgraphs within a factor 2 of the optimum density. We also show that solving the densest subgraph problem with an upper bound on size is as hard as solving the problem with an exact size constraint, within a constant factor. The k-f(k) dense subgraph problem ((k, f(k))-DSP) asks whether there is a k-vertex subgraph of a given graph G which has at least f(k) edges. When f(k)=k(k - 1) 2, (k,f(k))-DSP is equivalent to the well-known k-clique problem. The main purpose of this paper is to discuss the problem of finding slightly dense subgraphs. Note that f(k) is about k2 for the k-clique problem. It is shown that (k,f(k))-DSP remains NP-complete for f(k)= Θ(k1+e) where e may be any constant such that 0 < e < 1. It is also NP-complete for "relatively" slightly-dense subgraphs, i.e., (k, f(k))-DSP is NP-complete for f(k)= ek2 υ2(1 +O(υe-1)), where υ is the number of G's vertices and e is the number of G's edges. This condition is quite tight because the answer to (k, f(k))-DSP is always yes for f(k)= ek2 υ2(1 -(υ- k) (υk- k)) that is the average number of edges in a subgraph of k vertices. Also, we show that the hardness of (k, f(k))-DSP remains for regular graphs: (k, f(k))-DSP is NP-complete for Θ(υe1)-regular graphs if f(k)= Θ(k1-e2) for any 0 < e1, e2 < 1. Given an n-vertex graph G and a parameter k, we are to find a k-vertex subgraph with the maximum number of edges. This problem is NP-hard. We show that the problem remains NP-hard even when the maximum degree in G is three. When G contains a k-clique, we give an algorithm that for any e sub sub<) e). We study the applicability of semidefinite programming for approximating the dense k-subgraph problem. Our main result in this respect is negative, showing that for k @ n1 3, semidefinite programs fail to distinguish between graphs that contain k-cliques and graphs in which the densest k-vertex subgraph has average degree below logn. In this paper we study the densest subgraph problem, which plays a key role in many graph mining applications. The goal of the problem is to find a subset of nodes that induces a graph with maximum average degree. The problem has been extensively studied in the past few decades under a variety of different settings. Several exact and approximation algorithms were proposed. However, as normal graph can only model objects with pairwise relationships, the densest subgraph problem fails in identifying communities under relationships that involve more than 2 objects, e.g., in a network connecting authors by publications. We consider in this work the densest subgraph problem in hypergraphs, which generalizes the problem to a wider class of networks in which edges might have different cardinalities and contain more than 2 nodes. We present two exact algorithms and a near-linear time r-approximation algorithm for the problem, where r is the maximum cardinality of an edge in the hypergraph. We also consider the dynamic version of the problem, in which an adversary can insert or delete an edge from the hypergraph in each round and the goal is to maintain efficiently an approximation of the densest subgraph. We present two dynamic approximation algorithms in this paper with amortized polog update time, for any e > 0. For the case when there are only insertions, the approximation ratio we maintain is r(1+e), while for the fully dynamic case, the ratio is r2(1+e). Extensive experiments are performed on large real datasets to validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our algorithms. Given a large graph,the densest-subgraph problem asks to find a subgraph with maximum average degree. When considering the top-k version of this problem, a naive solution is to iteratively find the densest subgraph and remove it in each iteration. However, such a solution is impractical due to high processing cost. The problem is further complicated when dealing with dynamic graphs, since adding or removing an edge requires re-running the algorithm. In this paper, we study the top-k densest-subgraph problem in the sliding-window model and propose an efficient fully-dynamic algorithm. The input of our algorithm consists of an edge stream, and the goal is to find the node-disjoint subgraphs that maximize the sum of their densities. In contrast to existing state-of-the-art solutions that require iterating over the entire graph upon any update, our algorithm profits from the observation that updates only affect a limited region of the graph. Therefore, the top-k densest subgraphs are maintained by only applying local updates. We provide a theoretical analysis of the proposed algorithm and show empirically that the algorithm often generates denser subgraphs than state-of-the-art competitors. Experiments show an improvement in efficiency of up to five orders of magnitude compared to state-of-the-art solutions. The maximum clique problem provides a classic framework for detecting cohesive subgraphs. However, this approach can fail to detect much of the cohesive structure in a graph. To address this issue, Seidman and Foster introduced k-plexes as a degree-based clique relaxation. More recently, formulated the maximum k-plex problem as an integer program and designed a branch-and-cut algorithm. This paper derives a new upper bound on the cardinality of k-plexes and adapts combinatorial clique algorithms to find maximum k-plexes. Given two graphs @math and @math , the Subgraph Isomorphism problem asks if @math is isomorphic to a subgraph of @math . While NP-hard in general, algorithms exist for various parameterized versions of the problem: for example, the problem can be solved (1) in time @math using the color-coding technique of Alon, Yuster, and Zwick; (2) in time @math using Courcelle's Theorem; (3) in time @math using a result on first-order model checking by Frick and Grohe; or (4) in time @math for connected @math using the algorithm of Matou s ek and Thomas. Already this small sample of results shows that the way an algorithm can depend on the parameters is highly nontrivial and subtle. We develop a framework involving 10 relevant parameters for each of @math and @math (such as treewidth, pathwidth, genus, maximum degree, number of vertices, number of components, etc.), and ask if an algorithm with running time [ f_1(p_1,p_2,..., p_ ) n^ f_2(p_ +1 ,..., p_k) ] exist, where each of @math is one of the 10 parameters depending only on @math or @math . We show that all the questions arising in this framework are answered by a set of 11 maximal positive results (algorithms) and a set of 17 maximal negative results (hardness proofs); some of these results already appear in the literature, while others are new in this paper. On the algorithmic side, our study reveals for example that an unexpected combination of bounded degree, genus, and feedback vertex set number of @math gives rise to a highly nontrivial algorithm for Subgraph Isomorphism. On the hardness side, we present W[1]-hardness proofs under extremely restricted conditions, such as when @math is a bounded-degree tree of constant pathwidth and @math is a planar graph of bounded pathwidth. par>We prove some non-approximability results for restrictions of basic combinatorial optimization problems to instances of bounded “degreeror bounded “width.” Specifically: We prove that the Max 3SAT problem on instances where each variable occurs in at most B clauses, is hard to approximate to within a factor @math , unless @math . H stad [18] proved that the problem is approximable to within a factor @math in polynomial time, and that is hard to approximate to within a factor @math . Our result uses a new randomized reduction from general instances of Max 3SAT to bounded-occurrences instances. The randomized reduction applies to other Max SNP problems as well. We observe that the Set Cover problem on instances where each set has size at most B is hard to approximate to within a factor @math unless @math . The result follows from an appropriate setting of parameters in Feige's reduction [11]. This is essentially tight in light of the existence of @math -approximate algorithms [20, 23, 9] We present a new PCP construction, based on applying parallel repetition to the inner verifier,'' and we provide a tight analysis for it. Using the new construction, and some modifications to known reductions from PCP to Hitting Set, we prove that Hitting Set with sets of size B is hard to approximate to within a factor @math . The problem can be approximated to within a factor B [19], and it is the Vertex Cover problem for B =2. The relationship between hardness of approximation and set size seems to have not been explored before. We observe that the Independent Set problem on graphs having degree at most B is hard to approximate to within a factor @math , unless P = NP . This follows from a comination of results by Clementi and Trevisan [28] and Reingold, Vadhan and Wigderson [27]. It had been observed that the problem is hard to approximate to within a factor @math unless P = NP [1]. An algorithm achieving factor @math is also known [21, 2, 30, 16 . Assuming that NP spl nsube spl cap sub spl epsi > 0 BPTIME(2 sup n spl epsi ), we show that graph min-bisection, densest subgraph and bipartite clique have no PTAS. We give a reduction from the minimum distance of code problem (MDC). Starting with an instance of MDC, we build a quasi-random PCP that suffices to prove the desired inapproximability results. In a quasi-random PCP, the query pattern of the verifier looks random in some precise sense. Among the several new techniques introduced, we give a way of certifying that a given polynomial belongs to a given subspace of polynomials. As is important for our purpose, the certificate itself happens to be another polynomial and it can be checked by reading a constant number of its values. We present algorithmic and hardness results for network design problems with degree or order constraints. The first problem we consider is the Survivable Network Design problem with degree constraints on vertices. The objective is to find a minimum cost subgraph which satisfies connectivity requirements between vertices and also degree upper bounds @math on the vertices. This includes the well-studied Minimum Bounded Degree Spanning Tree problem as a special case. Our main result is a @math -approximation algorithm for the edge-connectivity Survivable Network Design problem with degree constraints, where the cost of the returned solution is at most twice the cost of an optimum solution (satisfying the degree bounds) and the degree of each vertex @math is at most @math . This implies the first constant factor (bicriteria) approximation algorithms for many degree constrained network design problems, including the Minimum Bounded Degree Steiner Forest problem. Our results also extend to directed graphs and provide the first constant factor (bicriteria) approximation algorithms for the Minimum Bounded Degree Arborescence problem and the Minimum Bounded Degree Strongly @math -Edge-Connected Subgraph problem. In contrast, we show that the vertex-connectivity Survivable Network Design problem with degree constraints is hard to approximate, even when the cost of every edge is zero. A striking aspect of our algorithmic result is its simplicity. It is based on the iterative relaxation method, which is an extension of Jain's iterative rounding method. This provides an elegant and unifying algorithmic framework for a broad range of network design problems. We also study the problem of finding a minimum cost @math -edge-connected subgraph with at least @math vertices, which we call the @math -subgraph problem. This generalizes some well-studied classical problems such as the @math -MST and the minimum cost @math -edge-connected subgraph problems. We give a polylogarithmic approximation for the @math -subgraph problem. However, by relating it to the Densest @math -Subgraph problem, we provide evidence that the @math -subgraph problem might be hard to approximate for arbitrary @math . Recently, hardness results for problems in P were achieved using reasonable complexity-theoretic assumptions such as the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis. According to these assumptions, many graph-theoretic problems do not admit truly subquadratic algorithms. A central technique used to tackle the difficulty of the above-mentioned problems is fixed-parameter algorithms with polynomial dependency in the fixed parameter (P-FPT). Applying this technique to clique-width, an important graph parameter, remained to be done. In this article, we study several graph-theoretic problems for which hardness results exist such as cycle problems, distance problems, and maximum matching. We give hardness results and P-FPT algorithms, using clique-width and some of its upper bounds as parameters. We believe that our most important result is an algorithm in O(k4 ⋅ n + m)-time for computing a maximum matching, where k is either the modular-width of the graph or the P4-sparseness. The latter generalizes many algorithms that have been introduced so far for specific subclasses such as cographs. Our algorithms are based on preprocessing methods using modular decomposition and split decomposition. Thus they can also be generalized to some graph classes with unbounded clique-width. A theorem of A. Schrijver asserts that a d-regular bipartite graph on 2n vertices has at least @math perfect matchings. L. Gurvits gave an extension of Schrijver’s theorem for matchings of density p. In this paper we give a stronger version of Gurvits’s theorem in the case of vertex-transitive bipartite graphs. This stronger version in particular implies that for every positive integer k, there exists a positive constant c(k) such that if a d-regular vertex-transitive bipartite graph on 2n vertices contains a cycle of length at most k, then it has at least @math perfect matchings. We continue research into a well-studied family of problems that ask if the vertices of a graph can be partitioned into sets A and B, where A is an independent set and B induces a graph from some specified graph class G. We let G be the class of k-degenerate graphs. The problem is known to be polynomial-time solvable if k=0 (bipartite graphs) and NP-complete if k=1 (near-bipartite graphs) even for graphs of diameter 4, as shown by Yang and Yuan, who also proved polynomial-time solvability for graphs of diameter 2. We show that recognizing near-bipartite graphs of diameter 3 is NP-complete resolving their open problem. To answer another open problem, we consider graphs of maximum degree D on n vertices. We show how to find A and B in O(n) time for k=1 and D=3, and in O(n^2) time for k >= 2 and D >= 4. These results also provide an algorithmic version of a result of Catlin [JCTB, 1979] and enable us to complete the complexity classification of another problem: finding a path in the vertex colouring reconfiguration graph between two given k-colourings of a graph of bounded maximum degree. In the densest subgraph problem, given an edge-weighted undirected graph (G=(V,E,w) ), we are asked to find (S V ) that maximizes the density, i.e., w(S) |S|, where w(S) is the sum of weights of the edges in the subgraph induced by S. This problem has often been employed in a wide variety of graph mining applications. However, the problem has a drawback; it may happen that the obtained subset is too large or too small in comparison with the size desired in the application at hand. In this study, we address the size issue of the densest subgraph problem by generalizing the density of (S V ). Specifically, we introduce the f-density of (S V ), which is defined as w(S) f(|S|), where (f: Z _ 0 R _ 0 ) is a monotonically non-decreasing function. In the f-densest subgraph problem (f-DS), we aim to find (S V ) that maximizes the f-density w(S) f(|S|). Although f-DS does not explicitly specify the size of the output subset of vertices, we can handle the above size issue using a convex concave size function f appropriately. For f-DS with convex function f, we propose a nearly-linear-time algorithm with a provable approximation guarantee. On the other hand, for f-DS with concave function f, we propose an LP-based exact algorithm, a flow-based (O(|V|^3) )-time exact algorithm for unweighted graphs, and a nearly-linear-time approximation algorithm. We give a lower bound of @math for the degree-4 Sum-of-Squares SDP relaxation for the planted clique problem. Specifically, we show that on an Erd "os-R 'enyi graph @math , with high probability there is a feasible point for the degree-4 SOS relaxation of the clique problem with an objective value of @math , so that the program cannot distinguish between a random graph and a random graph with a planted clique of size @math . This bound is tight. We build on the works of Deshpande and Montanari and , who give lower bounds of @math and @math respectively. We improve on their results by making a perturbation to the SDP solution proposed in their work, then showing that this perturbation remains PSD as the objective value approaches @math . In an independent work, Hopkins, Kothari and Potechin [HKP15] have obtained a similar lower bound for the degree- @math SOS relaxation. This paper studies the problem of detecting the presence of a small dense community planted in a large Erd o s-R 'enyi random graph @math , where the edge probability within the community exceeds @math by a constant factor. Assuming the hardness of the planted clique detection problem, we show that the computational complexity of detecting the community exhibits the following phase transition phenomenon: As the graph size @math grows and the graph becomes sparser according to @math , there exists a critical value of @math , below which there exists a computationally intensive procedure that can detect far smaller communities than any computationally efficient procedure, and above which a linear-time procedure is statistically optimal. The results also lead to the average-case hardness results for recovering the dense community and approximating the densest @math -subgraph.