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.