He Sun

He Sun, Danny Vagnozzi

Notions of graph similarity provide alternative perspective on the graph isomorphism problem and vice-versa. In this paper, we consider measures of similarity arising from mismatch norms as studied in Gervens and Grohe: the edit distance $δ_{\mathcal{E}}$, and the metrics arising from $\ell_p$-operator norms, which we denote by $δ_p$ and $δ_{|p|}$. We address the following question: can these measures of similarity be used to design polynomial-time approximation algorithms for graph isomorphism? We show that computing an optimal value of $δ_{\mathcal{E}}$ is \NP-hard on pairs of graphs with the same number of edges. In addition, we show that computing optimal values of $δ_p$ and $δ_{|p|}$ is \NP-hard even on pairs of $1$-planar graphs with the same degree sequence and bounded degree. These two results improve on previous known ones, which did not examine the restricted case where the pairs of graphs are required to have the same number of edges. Finally, we study similarity problems on strongly regular graphs and prove some near optimal inequalities with interesting consequences on the computational complexity of graph and group isomorphism.

Bogdan-Adrian Manghiuc, He Sun

Hierarchical clustering studies a recursive partition of a data set into clusters of successively smaller size, and is a fundamental problem in data analysis. In this work we study the cost function for hierarchical clustering introduced by Dasgupta, and present two polynomial-time approximation algorithms: Our first result is an $O(1)$-approximation algorithm for graphs of high conductance. Our simple construction bypasses complicated recursive routines of finding sparse cuts known in the literature. Our second and main result is an $O(1)$-approximation algorithm for a wide family of graphs that exhibit a well-defined structure of clusters. This result generalises the previous state-of-the-art, which holds only for graphs generated from stochastic models. The significance of our work is demonstrated by the empirical analysis on both synthetic and real-world data sets, on which our presented algorithm outperforms the previously proposed algorithm for graphs with a well-defined cluster structure.

Mihai Cucuringu, Huan Li, He Sun et al.

Graph clustering is a basic technique in machine learning, and has widespread applications in different domains. While spectral techniques have been successfully applied for clustering undirected graphs, the performance of spectral clustering algorithms for directed graphs (digraphs) is not in general satisfactory: these algorithms usually require symmetrising the matrix representing a digraph, and typical objective functions for undirected graph clustering do not capture cluster-structures in which the information given by the direction of the edges is crucial. To overcome these downsides, we propose a spectral clustering algorithm based on a complex-valued matrix representation of digraphs. We analyse its theoretical performance on a Stochastic Block Model for digraphs in which the cluster-structure is given not only by variations in edge densities, but also by the direction of the edges. The significance of our work is highlighted on a data set pertaining to internal migration in the United States: while previous spectral clustering algorithms for digraphs can only reveal that people are more likely to move between counties that are geographically close, our approach is able to cluster together counties with a similar socio-economical profile even when they are geographically distant, and illustrates how people tend to move from rural to more urbanised areas.

Yin Tat Lee, He Sun

For any undirected and weighted graph $G=(V,E,w)$ with $n$ vertices and $m$ edges, we call a sparse subgraph $H$ of $G$, with proper reweighting of the edges, a $(1+\varepsilon)$-spectral sparsifier if \[ (1-\varepsilon)x^{\intercal}L_Gx\leq x^{\intercal} L_{H} x\leq (1+\varepsilon) x^{\intercal} L_Gx \] holds for any $x\in\mathbb{R}^n$, where $L_G$ and $L_{H}$ are the respective Laplacian matrices of $G$ and $H$. Noticing that $Ω(m)$ time is needed for any algorithm to construct a spectral sparsifier and a spectral sparsifier of $G$ requires $Ω(n)$ edges, a natural question is to investigate, for any constant $\varepsilon$, if a $(1+\varepsilon)$-spectral sparsifier of $G$ with $O(n)$ edges can be constructed in $\tilde{O}(m)$ time, where the $\tilde{O}$ notation suppresses polylogarithmic factors. All previous constructions on spectral sparsification require either super-linear number of edges or $m^{1+Ω(1)}$ time. In this work we answer this question affirmatively by presenting an algorithm that, for any undirected graph $G$ and $\varepsilon>0$, outputs a $(1+\varepsilon)$-spectral sparsifier of $G$ with $O(n/\varepsilon^2)$ edges in $\tilde{O}(m/\varepsilon^{O(1)})$ time. Our algorithm is based on three novel techniques: (1) a new potential function which is much easier to compute yet has similar guarantees as the potential functions used in previous references; (2) an efficient reduction from a two-sided spectral sparsifier to a one-sided spectral sparsifier; (3) constructing a one-sided spectral sparsifier by a semi-definite program.

He Sun, Luca Zanetti

Graph clustering is a fundamental computational problem with a number of applications in algorithm design, machine learning, data mining, and analysis of social networks. Over the past decades, researchers have proposed a number of algorithmic design methods for graph clustering. However, most of these methods are based on complicated spectral techniques or convex optimisation, and cannot be applied directly for clustering many networks that occur in practice, whose information is often collected on different sites. Designing a simple and distributed clustering algorithm is of great interest, and has wide applications for processing big datasets. In this paper we present a simple and distributed algorithm for graph clustering: for a wide class of graphs that are characterised by a strong cluster-structure, our algorithm finishes in a poly-logarithmic number of rounds, and recovers a partition of the graph close to an optimal partition. The main component of our algorithm is an application of the random matching model of load balancing, which is a fundamental protocol in distributed computing and has been extensively studied in the past 20 years. Hence, our result highlights an intrinsic and interesting connection between graph clustering and load balancing. At a technical level, we present a purely algebraic result characterising the early behaviours of load balancing processes for graphs exhibiting a cluster-structure. We believe that this result can be further applied to analyse other gossip processes, such as rumour spreading and averaging processes.

Richard Peng, He Sun, Luca Zanetti

In this paper we study variants of the widely used spectral clustering that partitions a graph into k clusters by (1) embedding the vertices of a graph into a low-dimensional space using the bottom eigenvectors of the Laplacian matrix, and (2) grouping the embedded points into k clusters via k-means algorithms. We show that, for a wide class of graphs, spectral clustering gives a good approximation of the optimal clustering. While this approach was proposed in the early 1990s and has comprehensive applications, prior to our work similar results were known only for graphs generated from stochastic models. We also give a nearly-linear time algorithm for partitioning well-clustered graphs based on computing a matrix exponential and approximate nearest neighbor data structures.