How can we find a good graph clustering of a real-world network, that allows insight into its underlying structure and also potential functions? In this paper, we introduce a new graph clustering algorithm Dcut from a density point of view. The basic idea is to envision the graph clustering as a density-cut problem, such that the vertices in the same cluster are densely connected and the vertices between clusters are sparsely connected. To identify meaningful clusters (communities) in a graph, a density-connected tree is first constructed in a local fashion. Owing to the density-connected tree, Dcut allows partitioning a graph into multiple densely tight-knit clusters directly. We demonstrate that our method has several attractive benefits: (a) Dcut provides an intuitive criterion to evaluate the goodness of a graph clustering in a more natural and precise way; (b) Built upon the density-connected tree, Dcut allows identifying the meaningful graph clusters of densely connected vertices efficiently; (c) The density-connected tree provides a connectivity map of vertices in a graph from a local density perspective. We systematically evaluate our new clustering approach on synthetic as well as real data to demonstrate its good performance.
Metis is a class of multi-level partitioning techniques proposed by Karypis and Kumar @cite_10 , @cite_14 . Graph clustering starts with constructing a sequence of successively smaller (coarser) graphs, and a bisection of the coarsest graph is applied. Subsequently, a finer graph is generated in the next level based on the previous bisections. At each level, an iterative refinement algorithm such as Kernighan-Lin (KL) or Fiduccia-Mattheyses (FM) is used to further improve the bisection. A more robust overall multilevel paradigm has been introduced by Karypis and Kumar @cite_14 , which presents a powerful graph coarsening scheme. It uses simplified variants of KL and FM to speed up the refinement without compromising the overall quality.
@cite_14 @cite_10
2070232376 2004951603
Recently, a number of researchers have investigated a class of graph partitioning algorithms that reduce the size of the graph by collapsing vertices and edges, partition the smaller graph, and then uncoarsen it to construct a partition for the original graph [Bui and Jones, Proc. of the 6th SIAM Conference on Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing, 1993, 445--452; Hendrickson and Leland, A Multilevel Algorithm for Partitioning Graphs, Tech. report SAND 93-1301, Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM, 1993]. From the early work it was clear that multilevel techniques held great promise; however, it was not known if they can be made to consistently produce high quality partitions for graphs arising in a wide range of application domains. We investigate the effectiveness of many different choices for all three phases: coarsening, partition of the coarsest graph, and refinement. In particular, we present a new coarsening heuristic (called heavy-edge heuristic) for which the size of the partition of the coarse graph is within a small factor of the size of the final partition obtained after multilevel refinement. We also present a much faster variation of the Kernighan--Lin (KL) algorithm for refining during uncoarsening. We test our scheme on a large number of graphs arising in various domains including finite element methods, linear programming, VLSI, and transportation. Our experiments show that our scheme produces partitions that are consistently better than those produced by spectral partitioning schemes in substantially smaller time. Also, when our scheme is used to compute fill-reducing orderings for sparse matrices, it produces orderings that have substantially smaller fill than the widely used multiple minimum degree algorithm. In this paper, we present and study a class of graph partitioning algorithms that reduces the size of the graph by collapsing vertices and edges, we find ak-way partitioning of the smaller graph, and then we uncoarsen and refine it to construct ak-way partitioning for the original graph. These algorithms compute ak-way partitioning of a graphG= (V,E) inO(|E|) time, which is faster by a factor ofO(logk) than previously proposed multilevel recursive bisection algorithms. A key contribution of our work is in finding a high-quality and computationally inexpensive refinement algorithm that can improve upon an initialk-way partitioning. We also study the effectiveness of the overall scheme for a variety of coarsening schemes. We present experimental results on a large number of graphs arising in various domains including finite element methods, linear programming, VLSI, and transportation. Our experiments show that this new scheme produces partitions that are of comparable or better quality than those produced by the multilevel bisection algorithm and requires substantially smaller time. Graphs containing up to 450,000 vertices and 3,300,000 edges can be partitioned in 256 domains in less than 40 s on a workstation such as SGI's Challenge. Compared with the widely used multilevel spectral bisection algorithm, our new algorithm is usually two orders of magnitude faster and produces partitions with substantially smaller edge-cut.