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1. Optimal Quickest Change Detection in Sensor Networks Using Ordered Transmissions

   https://doi.org/10.1109/SPAWC48557.2020.9154270  

   Chen, Yicheng; Blum, Rick S.; Sadler, Brian M. (May 2020, 2020 IEEE 21st International Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications (SPAWC))

   null (Ed.)

   Quickest change detection in a sensor network is considered where each sensor observes a sequence of random variables and transmits its local information on the observations to a fusion center. At an unknown point in time, the distribution of the observations at all sensors changes. The objective is to detect the change in distribution as soon as possible, subject to a false alarm constraint. We consider minimax formulations for this problem and propose a new approach where transmissions are ordered and halted when sufficient information is accumulated at the fusion center. We show that the proposed approach can achieve the optimal performance equivalent to the centralized cumulative sum (CUSUM) algorithm while requiring fewer sensor transmissions. Numerical results for a shift in mean of independent and identically distributed Gaussian observations show significant communication savings for the case where the change seldom occurs which is frequently true in many important applications. 

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2. YACC: A Framework Generalizing TuránShadow for Counting Large Cliques

   Shweta Jain, Hanghang Tong (April 2022, SDM2022)

   Clique-counting is a fundamental problem that has application in many areas eg. dense subgraph discovery, community detection, spam detection, etc. The problem of k-clique-counting is difficult because as k increases, the number of k-cliques goes up exponentially. Enumeration algorithms (even parallel ones) fail to count k-cliques beyond a small k. Approximation algorithms, like TuránShadow have been shown to perform well upto k = 10, but are inefficient for larger cliques. The recently proposed Pivoter algorithm significantly improved the state-of-the-art and was able to give exact counts of all k-cliques in a large number of graphs. However, the clique counts of some graphs (for example, com-lj) are still out of reach of these algorithms. We revisit the TuránShadow algorithm and propose a generalized framework called YACC that leverages several insights about real-world graphs to achieve faster clique-counting. The bottleneck in TuránShadow is a recursive subroutine whose stopping condition is based on a classic result from extremal combinatorics called Turán's theorem. This theorem gives a lower bound for the k-clique density in a subgraph in terms of its edge density. However, this stopping condition is based on a worst-case graph that does not reflect the nature of real-world graphs. Using techniques for quickly discovering dense subgraphs, we relax the stopping condition in a systematic way such that we get a smaller recursion tree while still maintaining the guarantees provided by TuránShadow. We deploy our algorithm on several real-world data sets and show that YACC reduces the size of the recursion tree and the running time by over an order of magnitude. Using YACC, we are able to obtain clique counts for several graphs for which clique-counting was infeasible before, including com-lj. 

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3. From Cliques to Colorings and Back Again

   https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.CP.2022.26  

   Heule, Marijn J.; Karahalios, Anthony; van Hoeve, Willem-Jan (January 2022, 28th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2022))

   We present an exact algorithm for graph coloring and maximum clique problems based on SAT technology. It relies on four sub-algorithms that alternatingly compute cliques of larger size and colorings with fewer colors. We show how these techniques can mutually help each other: larger cliques facilitate finding smaller colorings, which in turn can boost finding larger cliques. We evaluate our approach on the DIMACS graph coloring suite. For finding maximum cliques, we show that our algorithm can improve the state-of-the-art MaxSAT-based solver IncMaxCLQ, and for the graph coloring problem, we close two open instances, decrease two upper bounds, and increase one lower bound. 

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4. Mining Largest Maximal Quasi-Cliques

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3446637  

   Sanei-Mehri, Seyed-Vahid; Das, Apurba; Hashemi, Hooman; Tirthapura, Srikanta (June 2021, ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data)

   Quasi-cliques are dense incomplete subgraphs of a graph that generalize the notion of cliques. Enumerating quasi-cliques from a graph is a robust way to detect densely connected structures with applications in bioinformatics and social network analysis. However, enumerating quasi-cliques in a graph is a challenging problem, even harder than the problem of enumerating cliques. We consider the enumeration of top- k degree-based quasi-cliques and make the following contributions: (1) we show that even the problem of detecting whether a given quasi-clique is maximal (i.e., not contained within another quasi-clique) is NP-hard. (2) We present a novel heuristic algorithm K ernel QC to enumerate the k largest quasi-cliques in a graph. Our method is based on identifying kernels of extremely dense subgraphs within a graph, followed by growing subgraphs around these kernels, to arrive at quasi-cliques with the required densities. (3) Experimental results show that our algorithm accurately enumerates quasi-cliques from a graph, is much faster than current state-of-the-art methods for quasi-clique enumeration (often more than three orders of magnitude faster), and can scale to larger graphs than current methods. 

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5. Algorithms Approaching the Threshold for Semi-random Planted Clique

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3564246.3585184  

   Buhai, Rares-Darius; Kothari, Pravesh K.; Steurer, David (January 2023, ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, STOC)

   We design new polynomial-time algorithms for recovering planted cliques in the semi-random graph model introduced by Feige and Kilian 2001. The previous best algorithms for this model succeed if the planted clique has size at least n2/3 in a graph with n vertices (Mehta, Mckenzie, Trevisan 2019 and Charikar, Steinhardt, Valiant 2017). Our algorithms work for planted-clique sizes approaching n1/2 -- the information-theoretic threshold in the semi-random model (Steinhardt 2017) and a conjectured computational threshold even in the easier fully-random model. This result comes close to resolving open questions by Feige 2019 and Steinhardt 2017. Our algorithms are based on higher constant degree sum-of-squares relaxation and rely on a new conceptual connection that translates certificates of upper bounds on biclique numbers in unbalanced bipartite Erdős--Rényi random graphs into algorithms for semi-random planted clique. The use of a higher-constant degree sum-of-squares is essential in our setting: we prove a lower bound on the basic SDP for certifying bicliques that shows that the basic SDP cannot succeed for planted cliques of size k=o(n2/3). We also provide some evidence that the information-computation trade-off of our current algorithms may be inherent by proving an average-case lower bound for unbalanced bicliques in the low-degree-polynomials model. 

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