skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: Finding Cliques in Social Networks: A New Distribution-Free Model
This paper proposes a new distribution-free model of social networks. The definitions are motivated by one of the most universal signatures of social networks, triadic closure—the property that pairs of vertices with common neighbors tend to be adjacent. Our most basic definition is that of a c-closed graph, where for every pair of vertices u, v with at least c common neighbors, u and v are adjacent. We study the classic problem of enumerating all maximal cliques, an important task in social network analysis. We prove that this problem is fixed-parameter tractable with respect to c on c-closed graphs. Our results carry over to weakly c-closed graphs, which only require a vertex deletion ordering that avoids pairs of non-adjacent vertices with c common neighbors. Numerical experiments show that well-studied social networks with thousands of vertices tend to be weakly c-closed for modest values of c.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1813188
PAR ID:
10096365
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
SIAM journal on computing
ISSN:
0097-5397
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Radio 2-colorings of graphs are a generalization of vertex colorings motivated by the problem of assigning frequency channels in radio networks. In a radio 2-coloring of a graph, vertices are assigned integer colors so that the color of two vertices u and v differ by at least 2 if u and v are neighbors, and by at least 1 if u and v have a common neighbor. Our work improves the best-known bounds for optimal radio 2-colorings of small hypercube graphs, a combinatorial problem that has received significant attention in the past. We do so by using automated reasoning techniques such as symmetry breaking and Cube and Conquer, obtaining that for n = 7 and n = 8, the coding-theory upper bounds of Whittlesey et al. (1995) are not tight. Moreover, we prove the answer for n = 7 to be either 12 or 13, thus making a substantial step towards answering an open problem by Knuth (2015). Finally, we include several combinatorial observations that might be useful for further progress, while also arguing that fully determining the answer for n = 7 will require new techniques. 
    more » « less
  2. null (Ed.)
    Abstract For positive integers n and d > 0, let $$G(\mathbb {Q}^n,\; d)$$ denote the graph whose vertices are the set of rational points $$\mathbb {Q}^n$$ , with $$u,v \in \mathbb {Q}^n$$ being adjacent if and only if the Euclidean distance between u and v is equal to d . Such a graph is deemed “non-trivial” if d is actually realized as a distance between points of $$\mathbb {Q}^n$$ . In this paper, we show that a space $$\mathbb {Q}^n$$ has the property that all pairs of non-trivial distance graphs $$G(\mathbb {Q}^n,\; d_1)$$ and $$G(\mathbb {Q}^n,\; d_2)$$ are isomorphic if and only if n is equal to 1, 2, or a multiple of 4. Along the way, we make a number of observations concerning the clique number of $$G(\mathbb {Q}^n,\; d)$$ . 
    more » « less
  3. Gørtz, Inge Li; Farach-Colton, Martin; Puglisi, Simon J; Herman, Grzegorz (Ed.)
    The min-diameter of a directed graph G is a measure of the largest distance between nodes. It is equal to the maximum min-distance d_{min}(u,v) across all pairs u,v ∈ V(G), where d_{min}(u,v) = min(d(u,v), d(v,u)). Min-diameter approximation in directed graphs has attracted attention recently as an offshoot of the classical and well-studied diameter approximation problem. Our work provides a 3/2-approximation algorithm for min-diameter in DAGs running in time O(m^{1.426} n^{0.288}), and a faster almost-3/2-approximation variant which runs in time O(m^{0.713} n). (An almost-α-approximation algorithm determines the min-diameter to within a multiplicative factor of α plus constant additive error.) This is the first known algorithm to solve 3/2-approximation for min-diameter in sparse DAGs in truly subquadratic time O(m^{2-ε}) for ε > 0; previously only a 2-approximation was known. By a conditional lower bound result of [Abboud et al, SODA 2016], a better than 3/2-approximation can't be achieved in truly subquadratic time under the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis (SETH), so our result is conditionally tight. We additionally obtain a new conditional lower bound for min-diameter approximation in general directed graphs, showing that under SETH, one cannot achieve an approximation factor below 2 in truly subquadratic time. Our work also presents the first study of approximating bichromatic min-diameter, which is the maximum min-distance between oppositely colored vertices in a 2-colored graph. We show that SETH implies that in DAGs, a better than 2 approximation cannot be achieved in truly subquadratic time, and that in general graphs, an approximation within a factor below 5/2 is similarly out of reach. We then obtain an O(m)-time algorithm which determines if bichromatic min-diameter is finite, and an almost-2-approximation algorithm for bichromatic min-diameter with runtime Õ(min(m^{4/3} n^{1/3}, m^{1/2} n^{3/2})). 
    more » « less
  4. null (Ed.)
    Graph parameters such as the clique number, the chromatic number, and the independence number are central in many areas, ranging from computer networks to linguistics to computational neuroscience to social networks. In particular, the chromatic number of a graph (i.e., the smallest number of colors needed to color all vertices such that no two adjacent vertices are of the same color) can be applied in solving practical tasks as diverse as pattern matching, scheduling jobs to machines, allocating registers in compiler optimization, and even solving Sudoku puzzles. Typically, however, the underlying graphs are subject to (often minor) changes. To make these applications of graph parameters robust, it is important to know which graphs are stable for them in the sense that adding or deleting single edges or vertices does not change them. We initiate the study of stability of graphs for such parameters in terms of their computational complexity. We show that, for various central graph parameters, the problem of determining whether or not a given graph is stable is complete for $$\Phi_2^p$$, a well-known complexity class in the second level of the polynomial hierarchy, which is also known as “parallel access to NP.” 
    more » « less
  5. Given a graph G, the zero forcing number of G, Z(G), is the minimum cardinality of any set S of vertices of which repeated applications of the forcing rule results in all vertices being in S. The forcing rule is: if a vertex v is in S, and exactly one neighbor u of v is not in S, then u is added to S in the next iteration. Hence the failed zero forcing number of a graph was defined to be the cardinality of the largest set of vertices which fails to force all vertices in the graph. A similar property called skew zero forcing was defined so that if there is exactly one neighbor u of v is not in S, then u is added to S in the next iteration. The difference is that vertices that are not in S can force other vertices. This leads to the failed skew zero forcing number of a graph, which is denoted by F−(G). In this paper, we provide a complete characterization of all graphs with F−(G)=1. Fetcie, Jacob, and Saavedra showed that the only graphs with a failed zero forcing number of 1 are either: the union of two isolated vertices; P3; K3; or K4. In this paper, we provide a surprising result: changing the forcing rule to a skew-forcing rule results in an infinite number of graphs with F−(G)=1. 
    more » « less